Staying alive
David Mack has an essay in Slate about how it may make sense on various personal and political levels to drop out of the news cycle, or at least disconnect from it to some extent:
To be clear, I make no judgment here. For months now in my New York City and social media bubbles, the dominant attitude has been to delude ourselves that this isn’t really happening. Every time I read aloud some headline about a Cabinet appointment to my partner, he would practically get up and leave the room. “How can you watch that?” he asked me when I tuned in to the inauguration on Monday, having decided that I probably couldn’t shut this out any longer, before regretting my decision almost immediately.
Team Trump has made no secret of their strategy to flood the zone—with appointees, with executive orders, with scandal. And this constant wave of news seemingly designed in a lab to trigger the libs, or anyone with a commitment to truth and decency, can lead to stress and burnout, according to psychologists (and most likely our own analysis of ourselves from 2017–2020). News fatigue is real, but each one of those alerts and headlines speaks to something very real that’s happening. These things will require a response, even if it doesn’t look like the “Resistance” of old.
In fact, maybe it’s time to admit that it’s better if it doesn’t, because that evidently failed. Nonstop outrage is also exhausting and only fuels the reactionary conservative forces that got us here. We need to find a new way to live under Trump, and that starts with a new way of engaging with him. This time, let’s not let him be the loudest person in our lives.
If many outlets have changed how they cover Trump, then much of their audience is changing how they consume this news, too. This time around, we need not strap ourselves in, eyes glued eternally open like we’re in A Clockwork Orange. We can know that there is a difference between staying informed and staying eternally outraged. Allow yourself the grace of not losing your mind, because dark forces are hoping that you do. In a democracy, ignorance is never the right answer, but long-term resistance requires sustained energy and a clear mind. It’s OK—healthy, even—to be selective about how much news you’re consuming or when you’re consuming it. It’s much too early to say what are the most effective ways to hold this administration to account, but with time and clear minds we can figure it out.
The irony here, as Mack points out, is that he was an editor for Buzzfeed during Trump’s first term, when his job was to turn every 2 AM news alert into Internet fodder.
A lot of what he’s saying resonates for me personally, even though I’m by contemporary standards not even part of the breaking news fetish cycle: I don’t do any social media, I don’t have news alerts on my phone, and I spend several hours a day completely unconnected to the Internet, which I’m beginning to realize is making me more and more like some lost neolithic herdsman in inner Siberia, relatively speaking.
So it was this morning that I woke to the news that Trump last night suggested ethnically cleansing Gaza (great beaches to develop!), and annexing Greenland (a lot of people are saying that nobody really knows what sort of claim Denmark even has to that land), and making Canada the 51st state, because hey look how big it is and it’s right there and full of white people, I suppose.
It hasn’t even been a week, and I think Mack is right that we can’t “do” this like the first time around, especially since the whole thing feels like we’re getting played by a malevolent imbecile’s abuser strategies.
I’m interested in the community’s thoughts on this.