What Do All These Insane Election Moments Have In Common?

It's all happening so much all the time.

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The last week of a national election is, understandably, a pretty fraught, frantic time. Candidates bombard the public with last-ditch appeals. Phones turn into Hitachi wands from the non-stop buzzing of campaign emails and desperate solicitation texts. Alcohol sales go through the roof. I personally find myself picking fights with random peckerheads online, if only as a way to vent some of the anxiety and agitation that’s been steadily building over the past few months. And that’s just in a normal year.

As many, many, many people have pointed out, this year’s election is anything but normal. It is a non-stop barrage of shotgun blasts to the gut, shredding our psyches into ground beef with scattershot pellets of vitriol and disappointment. And because we belong to a species that craves order over chaos, we end up looking for patterns and portents that — we hope — will help anchor us in the whirling eddies of psychic bedlam.

For me, that’s meant experiencing this past week (which, frankly, has sucked) not as a series of unrelated episodes, but as an interconnected latticework of…I’m not sure, exactly. But, something. And that something feels much more intense than it ever has in the past. Maybe I’m just a victim of my own brain’s faulty sense of pattern recognition, but it sure seems like things are a whole lot more bonkers this time around.

Here’s a few examples of what I’m talking about.