It’s hard to watch the news and harder to talk about it with people who might disagree. I’m overwhelmed. Are you?
I’m a lucky guy. I have a happy marriage. I’m healthy. My wife is healthy. We live in a lovely suburb just remote enough that there’s not much crime, and we can still get good produce within a short drive. I work hard, but I’m paid well. I have friends here in Oregon and all over the planet. My adult kids are good people: the most important thing I’ve ever helped to make happen. My parents are alive and well. After both of our corgis died a few months ago, we’re now planning to adopt a Bernese Mountain Dog. (I know that sounds like a shift, but I always described Ace, the corgi we had longest, as a Berner trapped in the body of a corgi.)
Still, I’m overwhelmed. And if I’m overwhelmed with all my blessings, then it must be so much worse for people who struggle with illness, making ends meet, kids with challenges, loneliness, and more.
I created this image using PowerPoint.*
I’m a news junkie who is becoming phobic about the news. (I’m far from the only one.)
Outside of trivial news coverage (sports, lifestyle), there are no safe topics.
Everything is a paradox.
I think that pharmaceutical companies advertising directly to patients is bad for patients and doctors, but, as my friend Brian Wieser has observed, pharma ads are what keep television news financially afloat, so RFK, Jr.’s attack on pharma ads is also another knife in the back of journalism.
Chicken Little had it easy: she only had to worry about the sky falling. We get to worry about satellites falling from the sky and spying on us before they plunge.
We have two faraway wars in Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, but even though they’re faraway it’s risky to talk about either of them because we’re so polarized. As a Jew living in the USA, it’s hard to have a conversation with other Jews in which I can bothcondemn Hamas for a despicable, vicious attack on October 7 (nearly two years ago?) and condemn how Israel’s war on Hamas has killed so many innocent civilians in Gaza. Why is it unreasonable to hold both opinions?
Charlie Kirk didn’t deserve to be assassinated by a mentally ill kid. Nobody does.
But what if this was a science fiction movie in which we could extract Kirk from the moment just before the gun went off? Held in a time travel limbo like the white room in Quantum Leap, the time travelers would show Kirk the 2023 footage when he said, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”** Would Kirk have changed his mind knowing that he himself was about to be one of the unfortunate gun deaths?
Conservative readers may be reaching for the unsubscribe button just because I’ve asked that question. While I’m sad to see any reader go, when did the right reaction to an opinion that’s different than yours become either to silence the person or stick your fingers in your ears?
The comment that provoked Disney to pull Jimmy Kimmel’s show was: “We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and do everything they can to score political points from it.”
Kimmel wasn’t saying anything derogatory about Kirk, but if you watch President Trump’s comment in this news report, Trump claims that Kimmel said “a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk,” which is not the case.
If Kimmel made any mistake, and I don’t think he did, then it was to characterize Tyler Robinson, the assassin, as MAGA. There has been nothing conclusive in any reporting about Robinson’s politics. He grew up in a conservative family but registered as neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Even if he had registered for either party, that does not mean that Robinson’s political affiliation drove him to kill Charlie Kirk. After a successful academic career in high school, Robinson dropped out of university after a semester. I suspect he was struggling with depression, but we won’t know for a long time.
I’m not just overwhelmed by these particular stories and by our ever deepening polarization. That would be easy. I’m also overwhelmed by the onslaught of contradictory coverage about AI: it’s going to save us; it’s going to kill us. We haven’t even figured out how to deal with social media and smartphones!
And I’m underwhelmed by the possible solutions to these problems. Progressives hold out hope that the mid-terms will see Democrats retake the house, which would at least slow down the rate of alarming changes to our society, but that’s more than a year away.
I’d just like to be whelmed for a while. Not panicked, not hopeless. Just whelmed.
What about you?
Note: To receive articles like this one—plus a whole lot more—in your email inbox, please subscribe to my free newsletter: The Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch.
* No AI Image Prompt this time: just human intelligence (such as it is) and PPT.
** Kirk’s description of the Second Amendment, something that James Madison wrote in 1789, as protecting “God-given rights” makes so little sense that it gives me a headache, unless Kirk somehow thought that Madison had a direct connection to God.
Leave a Reply