Our Compounded Trauma

me stop. I have a lot of gratitude for my friends, for my family and loved ones who have been checking in on me, who helped me do shopping, who have been really just lovely and wonderful. I'm just, you know, annoyed with myself. But folks, I did not stay away from the news over the holiday weekend because I did TV on Saturday and Sunday. And what I will say today, which is the week, it's been a week since the

shooting in Uvalde, Texas. It's been a week since we have learned about really just atrocious, disgusting, unbelievable, outrageous details how nineteen police officers who were armed, stood outside for an hour while children were screaming inside being massacred, while two teachers were doing the jobs that police officers, who whose budgets are forty of the entire community and town and city of Uvaldi, did nothing, as reports come out that some of those officers went in and rescued their

own children and left other children to the slaughter of an eighteen year old arm with a weapon of war. The New York Times over the holiday weekend had a visual that said authorities say the gunmen accessed purchased the gun legally, and it was literally fifteen of the last mass shootings where the gunmen all got their guns legally. Because we live in a country where at the age of eighteen, you can't buy sudafed, but you can absolutely

buy an AAR fifteen. We live in a country where we do not trust people with uteruses to make decisions about their own bodies, because that's considered murder. But we totally applaud as many did, thousands did at the NRA's conference in Houston, where, by the way, guns were not permitted because you know, safety measures. Applaud this. No rule, no red flags, no background checks, no nothing, because they

believe it's a slippery slope. We're beyond slippery slopes. We live in a country where parents, I don't even know how you all are making the decisions these days. I mean, my only prayer and saving grace is that it is June and God willing in a couple of weeks, school will be out for summer, so we can all collectively hold our breaths for the next school shooting that will happen, probably in September. And in the meantime there'll be just

other mass shootings that happen over the summer. It was reported by the Washington Post that over the weekend there were eleven mass shootings. Because now I had been saying and again these stats change that a mass shooting is four or more people that have been killed by a gun at one time. Evidently it is seven in some places considered. I mean, here's my thing, it's a mass shooting if more than one person is killed, right, Like, I don't need to, you know, to slash hairs over

this issue. The fact is that our children are not safe in this country. We would rather ban books and blame critical race theories and as Ted Cruz stupid ass did blame doors and say that there should be one door in and one door out of schools. And I said in a TikTok that I did, which, by the way, if you're not following me on TikTok, you totally should

because I am loose there. Let's just say that I have no holds barred and it's Danielle Moody underscore FYI, if you are so inclined, but I said, Ted Cruz may want to check with a fucking fire marshal about one door in and one door out of a school, because are we turning our schools into prisons? Because society is so unsafe, We're arming teachers, We're doing everything except even trying to try. As Shannon Watts, who is the president of Mothers Against Gun Violence has said, we don't

even we haven't even tried trying. Right. It's not as if we say, okay, well, let's check off all the list of things that we have done to predict to prevent mass shootings in this country, We've done none of them. Background checks, red flag laws, minimum, you know, seven day waiting period while you are evaluated. I looked at a form a checklist that Canadians have to do in order to get a gun, and I thought, my god, this

seems extensive and exhaustive. Right, so you can feel comfortable knowing that the person that obtains a gun in Canada, right has been thoroughly checked out. But in America, Nah, you blow out eighteen candles on your birthday cake and then you get to blow away as many as your little heart desires. I don't know how else to say it.

We just don't care. You have Donald Trump, you know, at the NRA, blaming everything, single parent, households, churches, lack of church attendance, all of these things, wokeness, video games, everything except for the assault rifle that has been used in every single mass shooting that we've seen that have made it to the headlines. It's been ten years since kidna gartners and first graders who were mowed down in

their classroom in Newtown. It's been twenty three years since two high school students at Columbine entered their school shot and killed twelve people and then themselves. We've done nothing. We've done nothing except make it easier, as Governor Abbott did in Texas to lower ages in order to get a weapon of war, to do away with any type of laws that would make it safe for people to you exist free. Oh, you can carry a gun anywhere

you want. I think that America is done. I think that the America that you and I adults have grown up in and understood is done. I believe that we are already in an authoritarian environment where the majority of this country is now held hostage by the NRA and a handful of senators who are bought and sold like hookers from the NRA, who could care less about anything other than their own power and money. And it's disgraceful. And I can say all of the things that I've

been saying for years. We had the Vice President Kamala Harris say, after she attended the funeral of the eighty six year old black grandmother who was killed at Tops grocery in Buffalo, we need a band on assault rifles in this country, plain and simple. Joe Biden would then echo her sentiments, and I say, where is the fucking executive order? You have access to the smartest people in

the country, probably on the planet. Why is there no war room that has been put together to figure out how to maneuver around the gun Loophole's Why are there not constitutional scholars that are in this war room for the administration to put together the plans to keep Americans is,

particularly our children safe. Why do Democrats keep giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt as if they haven't continually showed you they don't give a fuck about your constitution, They don't give a fuck about the lives of children, They don't care about the rules and morals that have governed this country, as imperfect as it is. I just don't know what else you need to see and order to just do what needs to be done, and damn

the fucking consequences. How about putting everything in place, leaving everything on the fucking field, instead of just acquiescing to this neo authoritarian state that we're living in. I don't get it. And you know, frankly, when I was on Aim and Mohadeen's show on Sunday, I you know, was

not on there to talk about guns. I was on to talk about the midterm elections and to talk about the information that keeps being quote unquote discovered by journalists as they get access to more documents and more subpoenas around the insurrection. And we all know now right that Donald Trump was sitting watching TV gleefully as his followers were violently attempting to overthrow the government. We know that

Donald Trump said that Mike Pence should be hanged. We know that Mark Meadows was burning papers in his office. All of these people are still walking around free, and they'll continue to There'll be no accountability, There'll be no responsibility. If America makes it another handful of years, and by a handful, I mean like literally to the presidential election in twenty twenty four, I will be surprised. And when I say America, I mean that this false idea that

we have of this country. There are people who still believe, who are still under some type of spell and believe that America is not going to fall, that our democracy will maintain. When everything is showing you things to the contrary, I don't get it. And you know, I tell you all, I am ye of little faith. I have little faith in our institutions. I have less faith in the people that are running them. I have no faith in this administration to get anything done that will safeguard US ten

thousand dollars. They're saying, maybe to cancel student loan debt for millions of Americans that are billions of dollars in debt, mostly to the government. I broke my toe and you know, was talking to the doctor about health insurance and care in this country, and everything here is horrific. Our healthcare is shit, our government is shit. And I'm sorry, folks like I genuinely, I gotta tell you it pains me

and I have been, as you all know, struggling. I watched a really good segment that Aim and Mohaddeen did on Sunday ahead of my hit with a mental health provider, and I forget her name, is a black woman who was talking about what can now be referred to as our compounded trauma. It is when multiple events, multiple crises, are just stacked one after the other, and that America is also suffering, on top of everything else, a mental health crisis. More people are now dealing with depression now

than in twenty nineteen before the pandemic. There have been higher rates of attempted suicide. I've watched so many specials with the young kids who are you know, six ten teenagers about how they're suffering. I want you to think about what it could possibly be like to be a little kid. I don't care. Elementary school, middle school, high school.

They're all children to me going to school these days, and I mean these days as in like the last several decades, I don't know how you could possibly concentrate on learning. Every door slam, every bell ring would send me through the roof with fear, with anxiety, crippling fear

and anxiety. I sit on the couch and I just listen to these interviews, one after the other of these young kids from rob Elementary School in Uivaldi, and I burst into tears, and I am hundreds of miles away, cloistered in my apartment where I don't really want to leave because I'm terrified. Hey, I'm David Plots of Slates Political Gabfest. As another election season accelerates, it can be tricky to sort through all the noise and the news.

Each week, on the Gapfest, John Dickerson, Emily Bathlon and I decipher the headlines, break down the races, and tell you what issues really matter. We do not always agree, we definitely do not always agree, but we always deliver thoughtful debate and we always have a good time. So subscribe to Slate's Political Gapfest New episodes every Thursday. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from The

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you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday. Friends of mine you know have recently said who live in the city, or like, I don't want to take the subway anymore. I don't think that I'm going to be taking the subway anymore. So if I can't get to where I'm going walking or just paying the exorbitant fucking uber and Lift prices, like I'm not going because the idea of sitting on a subway when we've had two subway shootings

in the month of May, it's too much. So it's like, if we are adults and literally have the emotional capacity to work through our emotions and we are struggling. What the fuck do you think that little kids are doing?

How do you think that they are coping. This little boy six years old and rob elementary school, and he was standing with his mom as his being interviewed on MSNBC, and his mother is tearfully telling the reporters that he doesn't want to go back to school, and she's like, I really pray that he will eventually, like the school year is now done. But when the reporters said, why don't you want to go back to school, he said, because I'm scared. I don't want to die. I don't

want to die. He's six. Compounded trauma, a global health pandemic that is not gone, will probably never be gone, Escalated racism and hate crimes, escalated mass shootings, and we have election in less than six months that posters are telling us Republicans will regain control of the House, which is essentially handing over the House of Representatives to the Taliban. Like that's the thing that I'm like, why are we

mincing words? Why do we have such strong words and conviction when it comes to naming the violence that those outside of the United States do against their own people. We have no problem referring to other black and brown leaders in dictator as what they are, dictators, murderers, right, authoritarian is fascists. But when it comes to naming and describing the people who are causing the most violence, rise and hate in this country, it seems that our leaders

struggle like a cat's got their tongue. Handing over the keys to the House of Representatives to the white supremacist Council is akin to handing it over to isis to the Taliban, to a guerrilla militia, and thinking that, well, I hope that they do the right thing. What like, these people are known terrorists, they're known killers. Oh, but

they're telling you that they're gonna do right. So you're going to give them the benefit of the doubt and not trust past behavior and not trust the patterns that you that they have established. We're just going to take

their word for it. If I were a billionaire, unlike fucking Elon Musk and the rest of these wealthy white ciss fucking hetero like egomaniacs, I would be pouring billions of dollars into blanketed ads across this country, particularly in Red states, particularly in battleground areas from now until fucking December,

when the elections will probably actually be decided. Every single other ad would be about mass shootings, gun fires perpetrated at the hands of white supremacists, and next to it all of the Republicans and Democrats who take money from the NRA. It would be the faces of young children, one after the other, casually going about their day, and then darkness hits running for their lives, covering themselves in their friend's blood to pretend to be dead. It would

run non stop. You wouldn't be able to turn on a podcast, turn on a screen without hearing or seeing it. That's what I would do. I would pour money into every single Democratic candidate for every single level of office that the Democratic establishment decides to ignore because they don't think that they're viable. If I were a multi billionaire, I would be working round the clock to try and save our democracy and putting pressure where pressure needed to be.

But you see, the white male Cis hetero billionaires in this country, much as it with the poor white Cis fucking hetero men, and this could only give a fuck about themselves. It is that individualistic mentality, this raw selfishness, the Gordon Gecko from Wall Street that is taken over not only our culture, but our politics. It's a reason why we are here. Things don't just atrophy overnight. It takes time. And that is what has happened to our democracy.

It is completely atrophied because money in politics has literally suffocated the people's ability to have a voice in power. And so without that reflexive muscle being, what is actually supposed to guide our representatives at the state, local, and federal level that take an oath to do right by the Constitution has died. And this is once again coming at the hands of the Supreme Court, Citizens United, the case that turned corporations into company, corporations into people can

give as much as they want money. Capitalism, greed is why the gun lobby succeeds. It's why racism prevails. Think about it. If you were to rid money from politics, if you didn't need billions of dollars to run for president, if you didn't need hundreds of millions of dollars to run for Congress, if you take away the power of the donor class and actually give it back to the people, you think we would be in this position where the last six elections the popular vote Democrats won, but they

only won the last two presidential elections. Don't you think that over this time we would have changed how things were actually done. But it is money and politics and greed that disallows the people to be heard. I am so worried about this summer because I know that with summer comes a lot of violence, and with this compounded trauma,

swirling depression, easy access to guns, high inflation. I mean, I went to go and buy some flowers the other day for my patio, and I'm like, God, these are expensive. And then I asked my mother and she goes, oh, well, if you watch like the local news, they were telling us that the cost of flowers has gone up ten to thirty Why because they're being shipped in from god knows where, driven in from God knows where. And guess what that is diesel? Guess what the cost of diesel is?

Will you all know? You pass gas stations and guess who is offsetting who the companies are offsetting that cost to the consumer. So you can't even buy a bundle of flowers a fucking package of ground meat. I mean, so you just take all of these issues and I'm worried. A friend of mine said recently, you know, the air is really thick with anxiety. Be really mindful about like

your spidy senses as you are moving about. If you feel on edge, if you're looking around and you're not quite feeling right, leave, don't talk yourself out of it, because I think that we are all going to kind of go back to our hunter kind of feelings, Like there are senses that we haven't needed, right, because we're supposed to be in a civilized society. We are not. We ignore a lot of those feelings, those gut feelings, right, because we tell ourselves our mind is making it up.

And I'm saying to you now, I'm not ignoring mine anymore. Fine on a subway, which I can't be because I have a broken toe and I can't really move around. I have a giant boot on my foot. But if you find yourself on public transportation, in a store, theater and you feel uneasy, listen to that feeling. It may be what is going to save you. But it's this

feeling of just unease. Remember how I would talk about disease, right, and the fact that worry, fear, anxiety, all of these things create disease in our body, which makes it more susceptible to illness. But there is this really deep feeling of unease, don't feel safe anywhere, and I'm just like, so, what does that do? It then creates this even deeper sense of tribalism where we become untrusting of those around us because our senses are up, our walls go up.

The ripple effects of what is happening, what has happened so quickly if you think about this guy's twenty fifteen to me, and probably earlier the beginning of the tea party, so maybe that's around twenty ten, twenty eleven. This has all been bubbling up for the last twelve years because no one has been paying attention. Just politics as usual. It's not Republicans are violent white supremacists who will do anything, saying anything in order to assume power. They're doing nothing.

They don't care about the violence that's ensuing because it's not going to affect them right now. It will eventually, trust and believe, but right now, they're in their seventies and eighties. If they have kids, it's really their grandkids now, and they're at private schools or boarding schools where incidents of violence like this so far are not happening, so

they don't care. When was the last time that any member of Congress who has been in Congress for decades, not the new Cohort, have been inside of a grocery store? When was the last time they did anything that wasn't seriously vetted? So they're going to be protected. The wealthy the why the powerful, they're good. It is everybody else who is basically playing Russian Roulette every time that we leave our homes. I've been thinking a lot about what

to do and what I can say right now. For me, at the very least is I'm just going to continue telling the truth until it becomes increasingly dangerous for me to do so, because I believe that we will get to that place where it is going to be actually physically dangerous for people like myself to continue to be out and vocal about what is going on in this country. I will continue to encourage people to gather their community, run at all levels, give money if you can, volunteer

if you can do so safely. But honestly, I don't know how to get rid of this nagging sense of unease. I'm doubling down on my meditation. I've picked up of a book that I put down to kind of detach myself a bit from my phone, from the news so that I can just be. So whatever momentary solace you can provide for yourself, walking as clearly on hold until July,

so I won't be doing that. And because of that, I've started to have this sense of nervousness today around well, what am I going to do to stay mentally well? Because if I can't do physical activity in any real way, I have to figure out ways to give my mind and my heart rest. And I think all of us

do whatever it is that we have been doing. You know, we may have fallen off, as I admitted to and have admitted too, but the recognition of falling into old patterns is even as Young Pueblo, a writer, poet, an author has said, is part of your progress because when you initially were in old patterns, you weren't even recognizing

them as patterns. So even if we have fallen off of what has been keeping us mentally and physically, well, let's use this time as we enter into summer officially as a reenergizer to redouble our efforts to try some things that are new to collectively ground us. Because, friends, what we are up against, what we are headed, this headwind that we are headed towards is a dangerous one, and I believe that if we are not emotionally, spiritually, physically,

and mentally prepared for it, we will not survive. So think about what it is that you have been doing that has offered you moments, hours, you know, times of solace, and figure out how you double those efforts. For me, I've decided I'm going to finish one of the books that I'm reading. I have three more. I'm doing fiction because I've had enough nonfiction right now. I'm doing particularly African futurism, which is like my go to. It's really wonderful.

So I'm going to read. I'm going to detach. I'm going to go into other worlds and other spaces to re energize my spirit and my imagination. Because I find that when I detach from news, I give my mind an opportunity to dream, to envision, to imagine. I start to think differently, and that allows me to have different perspectives and associations and understanding with our reality. So think

for yourself. What does that look like for you? And then double those efforts and will continue being in conversation about it. Share in the comments section about things that you were trying and doing and what has worked for you. If you have fallen off and you find yourself back in this twenty four hour recycle of news and anxiety and stress and depression, be easy with yourself. It's so difficult not to fall back into these things, particularly when

these tragedies happen so frequently. So as we head into this week and we have no idea what it brings, think about what is one thing that you are going to be using this week to help you emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally ground Indisputable with Doctor Rashi Ricci is one of the latest shows on the TYT network and also

the fastest growing news show in America. On his show, Doctor Ricci plays no games regarding policy, delivering a heavy dose of fact based truth and penetrating analysis on all the top news stories focusing on racism, criminal and social justice, politics, police brutality, Karens, and much more. Listeners can also expect interviews with fascinating guests, political leaders, commentators, and even fiery debates with conservatives on a wide range of policy topics

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get woke and stay woke as fuck. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from the Emmy Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun laws and take a closer

look at how and why these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from the Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday,