A strategy for processing emotions in the chaos of election cycle

Sometimes I’m doing so much, juggling so many jobs, managing so many tasks, and working on so many different projects at once, that I feel the need to take a minute and sit down and make two lists. I make a list of everything I’m doing and also make a list of all the things that I intend to do or need to do or should be doing. I just need to see it all written down so I can organize it in my mind. Now, in a totally different vein, I think I need to sit down and write out two more lists.

Not for me, but for America. On the first list, I would jot down, like a scene from the movie Inside Out, all the emotions that I’m feeling these days. And that I’ve been feeling for the last few years, in fact. Why? Because I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one feeling these things.

Wait, on second thought, let me think about that. Admittedly, I’m in the news business, and so I have to consume an unhealthy amount of media every single day. Even at a time when, according to surveys, much of the American people are dialed into politics and current events, my level of entrenchment is, like most national journalists, next level. And as I said, not very healthy.

An average day, I read multiple newspapers, visit news sites, listen to podcasts, watch TV news, monitor social media, scan magazine pieces, and listen to live interviews. Oh, and I probably check my phone about 200 times. See? Perfectly normal obsessive behavior. All that media consumption is hurting me, I have no doubt. It’s eating up too much time and distracting me from my family, friends, and frivolity. It’s also probably skewing my sense of reality, like when political reporters who obsess over politics get to thinking that the rest

of America is doing the same, when most Americans have more important things to do with their lives. But one effect that all that media may be having is to make my emotions much sharper and more jagged. I feel things more deeply than I used to for better or worse. Whether it was the January 6 riots where MAGA meatheads tried to overturn an election because their guy lost, or the humanitarian crisis on the US-Mexico border which President Biden only made worse by copying his

predecessors playbook, or Biden’s horrific debate performance which has fueled Democratic efforts to get him to abandon his ill-fated re-election bid, or most recently the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, an attack that Trump survived with a minor injury but which claimed the life of one supporter and seriously injured another, well, like I said, on that first list, I’d write down all the emotions that I’m feeling as an

American living in 2024. Anger, fear, angst, exhaustion, distrust, dread, uncertainty, nervousness. I have loved politics since I was 15 years old, but in the last decade or so, I’ve also come to hate it. Most of the time, I feel under siege, as if the whole game is working overtime to make my life and the lives of my fellow Americans more difficult by dividing us and making us

distrustful of one another. As a journalist, I actually used to like chaos. I’m talking 20 or 25 years ago. We all learn a lot when Republicans or Democrats fight with one another rather than with each other. Order and conformity are overrated. We need to mix it up every once in a while. It keeps life fresh and interesting. But as I get older, I’ve changed. I’ve had enough chaos now to last me a lifetime. Now I

crave normalcy and stability and peace and I bet other Americans do too. See, that’s not a bad way to start that second list. You know, the one about the things that Americans should be feeling? Normalcy, stability, peace. Normalcy, stability, peace.

How sweet the sound.