Ever since the election, I periodically go through moods where I feel like I need to disconnect from the news/politics just to maintain a semblance of mental health. I delete my news and twitter apps and avoid the evening news and Sunday morning talk shows. Increasingly, I’ve become deeply distressed by everything going on in the world. It’s not just the minute-to-minute updates of the special elections, the growing tensions with North Korea, Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment or Trump defending him via Twitter, or the continued assault on Planned Parenthood and immigrants, or the cloud of smoke that is the Russia investigation, or the unwavering support Trump still gets from his base, or Marine Le Pen’s growing influence in France. But it’s also the more structural issues of increasing polarization because of gerrymandering, the ideological silos we live in and continually reinforce, the ever-growing amount of money that is funneled into presidential campaigns, the revolving door between corporate America and government. It’s everything else, too—climate change, economic inequality, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia. And it is exhausting and isolating. And maybe part of this hopelessness is because I just finished S-Town and John B. McLemore’s brand of nihilism and untiring pessimism is rubbing off on me.
There’s a psychological tendency we have to get further entrenched in our own views in debates. I know based on my own experience that I swing between pretty liberal and pretty moderate depending on my state of mind and what I’m reacting to. We don’t need more debates, more reiterations of the same tired arguments. We need, as cliché as it sounds, a re-education in patience, empathy, and compassion. We need to relearn how to meet in the middle in a very basic, communicative way. I’m ordinarily skeptical of politicians who advocate “governing from the middle” or unity for the sake of unity since this usually means maintaining the status quo and comes with the assumption that conservative and liberal viewpoints are equally valid and fair in the interminable “war of ideas.” But, in a non-ideological sense, we need to get better at not pushing each other to more and more extreme views.
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