Hillary Clinton’s New York Hometown Is Still Despondent Over Her Loss

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Commercially printed blue and white signs began springing up on lawns and traffic islands: “Thank you HILLARY CLINTON for your decades of public service.” Inside Chappaqua, a local zine, decked its winter issue with a cover photo of Hillary, eyes lifted skyward toward what might have been. Floating over her head, the caption reads “Pride and Gratitude.”

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Let me illustrate with an example close at hand. Jodi Baretz is a psychotherapist and mindfulness coach at a nearby center for holistic health and healing. She runs a “mindfulness bootcamp” for moms with time to take lessons in stress reduction. Evidently town moms needed help getting themselves together after November 8. Baretz’ local column, “Post-Election Anxiety,” features strategies for Hillary supporters: “After the shock, denial, anger, etc., we have to acknowledge that this is happening, allow ourselves to feel our feelings, but then we also do whatever is in our control to fight for what we believe.”

The coach admits to a gnawing in the pit of her stomach, a sense of impending doom. She is saddened that “our deserving neighbor” failed to conquer male privilege. She is fearful of a president who ran a campaign based on anger and hate: “I’m terrified by the racists and bigots he energized and the actions they might take. I have followed this election campaign holding my breath, wanting it to be over to breathe a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, now that it is presumably over, all I want to do is turn back time.”

Luckily, mindfulness offers a beacon to the tempest-tossed in the town’s five nail salons. Baretz tends the huddled masses while they lift a Starbucks chestnut praline latte with perfectly steamed micro-foam to quivering lips: “In my mindfulness boot camp group today, everyone was shocked, distraught, so we explored how mindfulness can help us cope with post-election blues.”

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Best of all, according to Coach Baretz, as we “practice non-judgment and tolerance,” we free up inner space for the possibility of “our party becoming stronger than ever and more people becoming activists for change.” Our party. A telling slip, that. The Inside Press mails issues to all residents in town, not simply to registered Democrats. Yet Baretz assumes a wholly like-minded audience.

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