Being a news junkie left me well-informed but simmering with rage. Unplugging from the media made me feel better, but is it a cop-out?



Like a lot of people I know, I’m a news junkie.

My particular weakness is the radio. It’s what I shower to, dress to, cook to, clean to. I drink my coffee to the New York Times. I exercise to CBS This Morning. All day long there’s Apple News on my phone and Twitter on my browser. No news quiz can stump me.

I feel informed, righteously so. The other thing I feel, a lot of the time, is rage. Rage and depression. Throughout the 2016 US presidential campaign season, my wife and son learn to measure the thoroughness of my daily intake of news by how furiously I chop vegetables for dinner, fuming at All Things Considered.

It all changes at 10:30pm, November 8, 2016.

On my TV, news anchor Wolf Blitzer is dazed, struggling to make sense of the election returns. And I – in the grip of a sickening dread – announce to my wife that I’m going to bed.

When I wake up tomorrow, I say, I don’t want to hear what happened. I can’t bear the thought of the phrase President-elect Trump.

In the morning, my wife brings me a cup of coffee. You really don’t want to know? she says. The news is written clearly across her face.

Not now, I say. Not ever.

Though what exactly this means, I haven’t yet formulated. For the first time since as far back as I can remember, I don’t begin the morning of Nov. 9 by turning on National Public Radio (NPR).

I get ready for work in silence.

•••

That silence will remain. For the next year, I won’t turn the radio back on again. I won’t turn on the TV news. I won’t read a paper. I will embark on a journey into purposeful, determined ignorance.

That article on HuffPo that everyone’s talking about? I won’t know anything about it. I won’t see that tweet. I regret to say that I won’t get your Facebook invitations. I’m sorry for everything I’ve missed.

My news blackout isn’t something I advertise. Other than my wife, I tell no one. I decide news intolerance is like dietary preferences, something you should keep to yourself. At every party in the weeks that follow, as my friends and colleagues catch up over the latest outrages, I head to the cheese spread. I mix drinks.

Every once in a while, at one of these parties, I overhear my wife whisper, Oh, Chris doesn’t know. He has no idea. A total news blackout.

The glee in her eyes is unmistakable. Then these friends and colleagues look at me like I’m some strange animal they’ve never seen before.

I discover audiobooks. For the next two weeks after the election, I listen to The Great Gatsby. Over and over again. Conveniently, I ignore the fact that Gatsby is a cautionary tale about thinking you can remake yourself.

Meanwhile, a surprising number of people seem to find my ignorance endearing. Word spreads gradually. Acquaintances come up to me, ask if it’s true.

You really have no idea what’s going on?

Not a clue, I say. Though this isn’t entirely true. Snippets, but little more.

What an amazing idea, they say. And they go on to tell me how miserable they are, how many hours a day they’re losing to their own grinding anger.

I wonder if they’re just trying to be polite. But they seem sincere.

Every time I’m amazed that they don’t turn away in disgust, that they don’t say, wow, what a coward. Which is what I imagine I would have thought, just a few months before.

•••

The week following the election, students are marching outside my office window. On many college campuses, protests are as regular as the weather. Ours is not one of those. I teach at a public university in the reddest region of a red state. Today, however, a formation of about a hundred students is parading. I can hear them through the glass, chanting no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.

Outside the library, they sit en masse, closing off the sidewalk. A crowd gathers around them.

I feel a pull, but I resist. I remind myself, You don’t want to know.

But another part of me understands that these are my students, this is my community. I’m a middle-class professor from a middle-class family. A citizen, white, male, straight—protected. No matter how depressed and enraged I feel, I should be offering my support, not burying my head in the sand.

I walk down the stairs.

Out on the walkway, the chanting has stopped. Everyone is still and peaceful. A bullhorn is passed.

A young woman in a hijab, voice shaking, talks about feeling targeted, family and friends profiled and threatened. The crowd applauds.

A young African American woman takes the bullhorn. She speaks eloquently, passionately about the sanctioning of violence against black bodies.

At the outer edge of the crowd, behind a Black Lives Matter sign, a few Trump banners and Hillary for Prison posters are starting to peek through.

Make America Great Again, someone shouts over the woman.

Suddenly each new person who rises to speak through the bullhorn is met with taunts.

I hear vulnerable students saying, in many different ways, I’m afraid.

Intentionally or not, the new arrivals seem to be saying, well, you should be.

And I feel that familiar depression and rage returning to consume me.

•••

No one enjoys this news blackout of mine more than my wife. She can’t get enough of my new calm. She herself is reading everything, more engaged than ever. She spends her days calling congressional offices. She marches in Washington. And then she comes home and we have drinks on our patio and all the infuriating events of the world, she gets to pretend they don’t exist for a while.

Everyone else, however, seems to be at war. I watch people I like disown other people I like. Judging by anecdotal evidence, Facebook appears to have become Faceblock, a firewall against cousins and coworkers who don’t share our political beliefs.

An acquaintance tells me, I can’t be friends with someone who voted for that lunatic.

A conservative neighbor reports having been unfriended by her own boss.

A close friend refuses to go home for the holidays, boycotting her family.

To none of them do I admit how peculiarly I myself feel at peace. In part, I’ve shut myself off from news that makes me angry. But along with the anger, I’ve unexpectedly discovered, has gone much of my righteousness. People with whom I disagree politically have not disappeared. Constant reminders of our disagreements, however, largely have.

Ignorance is far easier than I thought. I finish two or three audiobooks a week. I read novels instead of newspapers. Five months into my blackout, I’m happier than I ever was back in the days when I was informed. My fingernails are growing back. The sleeping pills remain in the bottle. I’m getting more work done. My family comes home at the end of the day to find me smiling, chopping things for dinner without my old vegicidal rage.

And yet, part of me can’t stop feeling guilty about feeling good.

Some news remains unavoidable. Friends send mass emails demanding action on this or that cause. A student finds Nazi flyers in her classroom. It gets to the point where I feel like I can’t sit by, doing nothing.

Needing a solution that doesn’t compromise my hard-won ignorance, I adopt one from the probably apocryphal saying of Joseph Kennedy: Don’t get mad, give money. I write checks, outsourcing my anger to people who, I hope, feel energized by theirs. I try to buy my conscience clean.

•••

At dinner in Detroit, my friend Lisa tells me I should be ashamed of myself.

I know! I say.

At first Lisa seems thrown off by my enthusiasm for being insulted. I tell her it’s been hard to find people willing to argue with me.

Well, I think it’s terrible.

I nod. What if everyone decided to do what I’m doing? I say. What if we all left the driving to someone else?

It’s irresponsible, she says.

Her reaction makes me wonder about geography. Most of the people who know about my project live around me in conservative East Tennessee. Living there with any kind of liberal leanings, you learn pretty quickly to pace yourself. But Lisa lives in Ann Arbor, the Berkley of the Midwest—Bernie country. She’s responded to the state of the world by doubling down.

But here’s the thing, I say. Here’s the question I keep asking myself: who exactly are we helping with our anger?

Lisa looks dubious.

Later, outside the restaurant, she says, I still think it’s wrong.

But everyone else seems to think what I’m doing makes perfect sense. They’re not willing to sign on, but more often than not they say they wish they could. I don’t say, what’s stopping you? I already know. What’s stopping them is the same voice that keeps telling me I’m a privileged coward.

But I no longer think it’s just politeness when people cheer me on. People are burnt out. They can’t take the constant barrage of outrage either.

•••

One of the audiobooks I listen to is Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark. In it Solnit talks about our impatience for political change and how that impatience leads to despair. I’m moved by this idea. And yet, I can’t stop wondering how we’re supposed to maintain perspective when events of the world keep demanding our immediate, frantic attention—when lives are at stake?

Lately I’ve noticed that every time I donate money, I get subscribed to a new political action email list. The pleas flood in daily: We need you to fight! Signature needed now! Everything depends on this!

After nine months of ignorance, I know only this: now that I no longer check the news every 15 minutes—now that I trash, unread, every email that comes in screaming of fresh crisis—I no longer live in a constant state of alarm. Simultaneously, I’ve discovered vast resources of patience I never knew I had.

•••

At a dinner party in early September, everyone keeps apologizing to me when the conversation turns to politics.

Don’t mind me, I say.

They try to steer toward other topics, but we keep coming back around—to DACA, to bigotry, to white supremacy.

I suddenly feel like that guy whose glass of tonic water makes everyone feel self-conscious about their drinking.

But no one tonight is drinking just water. We go through bottle after bottle of wine, and I begin to worry about our friend Jennifer, who at 8am tomorrow will be volunteering at an Emergency Deportation Family Event. Jennifer is always doing stuff like this. If she’s not helping families at risk of deportation, she’s attempting to explain white privilege to the League of Women Voters.

I’ve never talked with Jennifer about my current state of ignorance. More than anyone else, she’s the one I fear will lose respect for me.

Halfway through dinner, though, something unexpected happens. Jennifer leans over and says, You know, I’m on a blackout too.

It was just getting to be too much, she adds, noting my surprise.

But you’re always doing stuff, I say. You’re always involved.

I’m on a couple of community email groups, she says. I find out when there are things I can get involved in. But I’m not following the news.

I tell her that’s one of the things I’ve been wrestling with—the question of whether we need to be made upset by the news in order to be propelled to do things.

Not at all, she says.

If anything, says someone else, the anger makes it harder.

Everyone has turned to Jennifer and me.

Listening to NPR 24-hours a day. Getting depressed. Yelling at the TV. Complaining with friends. Tweeting about how mad we are. We spend so much time consuming news, Jennifer says, that we don’t have any energy or emotion left to do anything about it.

But without it, I say, aren’t we just going through the motions—acting without knowing why?

Consuming information, Jennifer says, isn’t the same as being informed. But it’s true I’m now counting on other people to tell me what to do. I’m trusting organizations like Indivisible.

Besides, Jennifer adds, anyone who knows history, anyone who’s been paying attention in recent years, already knows everything they need to. The major issues are stark and static and unsubtle.

But here’s what gets me, I say: liberals are constantly complaining that a big part of the reason this past election turned out the way it did was because people were ill-informed. We keep telling ourselves that if only people were paying attention, they couldn’t have voted for this madman.

That’s true, Jennifer says.

I say, Aren’t we now guilty of the same thing?

But you’re not uninformed, someone else says. You still get the big picture.

But that big picture must come with some kind of expiration date, I say. There must come a time when I can no longer claim to understand. But when?

•••

Over the past year, despite my ignorance, I’ve seen ample evidence of what we do that helps. Jennifer is an example. But even my mother—until recently one of the most apolitical people I’ve ever known—now spends her retirement pestering congresspeople. We’ve switched places. Now she’s the one who’s always upset.

My wife comes home flush from other triumphs: disastrous bills defeated; a victory in Alabama; fresh voices promising to reshape the future.

Meanwhile, my year of living ignorantly is coming to end.

Jennifer has found a system that works for her. Her blackout isn’t as complete as mine. She has her email groups, but she no longer listens to NPR or reads the newspaper. She’s removed herself from the hysteria of presidential politics, and she’s reinvested that energy locally.

But does it ever make you feel guilty, I ask her the next time I see her, thinking about the privilege that goes into not needing to know?

Of course, she says. But I’m not sure it’s any different from the privilege of sitting back and consuming news and getting upset, knowing it doesn’t affect you.

I ask her, If he were impeached tomorrow, would you go back to the way you were?

I don’t know, she says.

For both of us, the decision to tune out was instinctive. It was about sanity and self-preservation. But now that we’ve seen the other side, we don’t know if we can go back.

An assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Christopher Hebert is the author of the novels The Boiling Season and Angels of Detroit and is coeditor of Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience