Motivation

"Why Now?" We ask ourselves at times in the psychiatric emergency biz.  Yes, she has a horrible abuse history and is homeless, but that was true last week, last month, last year, and she was not in crisis. What has happened to upend things?

So why now for impeachment? Is it the amount of time it stands out from the election?  Is it to distract from some obvious conversations during the primary season? I suggest a main reason is to delegitimise any possible Supreme Court nomination (plus anything else he wants to do).  After all, how can we possibly accept the nomination of a president who is being impeached?

I wonder how long the nation can sustain this level of hysteria.  In the first year or so of Trump's presidency it was easy enough to ascribe it to him, directly or indirectly.  If his opponents were hysterical and employing kitchen-sink methods of stopping him, that was easily explained by how bad he is.  Their actions were not contemptible but noble and just, but that reckoning. It shows how they really understand the situation and how much they care. (Again, we understand their motives easily, they do not understand ours all that well. Thank you, Jonathan Haidt.) It's actually fairly easy to get a rest from Trump.  Just pay no attention to his tweets, not first hand, not second or third-hand. The rest is manageable.  It is harder to get a rest from Democrats and their crisis of the month, across a broad range of issues. Youth feel anxiety.  More than before, or about the same as always, it doesn't matter in politics. Democrats will keep telling them that Snowball destroyed the windmill, they are anxious because of Trump and conservatives.

It may be that this hysteria is not that difficult to sustain, but a baseline level of anxiety that we will attribute to something or other regardless of the reality around us. We all worry about as much as we can stand, and find it hard to worry less.