Hope, Denial, and Healthy Relationship with the News

a service presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on May 5, 2024

Opening Words

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
and the slow parade of fears 
(without crying).
Now I want to understand.

I have done all that I could 

to see the evil and the good 
(without hiding)
You must help me if you can.

Doctor, my eyes tell me what is wrong.
Was I unwise 
to leave them open for so long?

- Jackson Browne

Reading

In addition to its plot and characters, the novel All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren is one of the greatest storehouses of metaphors in American literature. Here’s one relevant to today’s topic:

It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second.

While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself.

The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.

Sermon

I’m taking a bit of a risk this morning.

Whenever I write a talk, I try to keep certain balances in mind. To me, those balances define what it means for a talk to be a Unitarian sermon rather than an academic lecture or a political speech or some other kind of sermon.

One of those balances is between the personal and the universal. I think a Unitarian sermon needs to be personal. It shouldn’t just be a collection of abstract notions I think you’ll find interesting. The topic should mean something to me and figure in my life. But on the other hand, a Unitarian sermon shouldn’t just be personal.  It shouldn’t be idiosyncratic. My experiences and struggles should illustrate some larger, more universal point, because this isn’t therapy and you didn’t come here to listen to my problems.

Today, though, I’m talking about an experience that I know is personal, but I’m only guessing about its universality. I think maybe something similar happens to a lot of you also, but we tend not to talk about things like this, so I don’t really know.

The experience is an intense spiraling downward that gets triggered not by anything in my personal life, but from my interaction with the news. I hear about something in the outside world, the public world that we all share, and then the walls come tumbling down.

Let me tell you the last time this happened to me. The trigger — which, looking back, seems kind of trivial, but these things usually do after a few months — was the Hur report. Maybe you remember: Robert Hur was the special counsel tasked with investigating President Biden’s unauthorized retention of classified documents, an investigation that in some ways paralleled the one that led to former President Trump’s Florida indictment. The bottom line of that investigation, from my partisan perspective, was positive: Hur found nothing that would justify pressing charges. As an official matter, the case was closed.

But along the way, he took a swipe at Biden’s mental competence, describing the president as “an elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age”. Biden responded with an angry press conference that made things worse. As he was leaving the room, he answered an unscripted question about Gaza, and said “Mexico” when he obviously meant “Egypt”.

And then the media frenzy was on. According to the CSS Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication: During the next week the New York Times alone published 26 unique articles about Biden’s age, only one of which pointed out that age might also be a problem for Trump. For a week, Biden’s age blotted out all other considerations: It mattered more than anything his administration had accomplished, more than Trump’s plans for authoritarian government, and even more than January 6th. Nothing else was worth discussing, because Biden is old.

And I thought, “My God, we’re doomed. We’re going to lose our democracy because one man said Mexico instead of Egypt.”

And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again.

In Paul Krugman’s subsequent column he didn’t talk explicitly about his emotions, but I imagined he was having a similar experience: “I am,” he wrote, “for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.”

OK. From here I could go into a long rant about the importance of this election, or how the media is covering it, or why in spite of everything I’m still hopeful about November. But that’s not where I want to go.

No, what I want to talk about is that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. The something doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change or the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.

One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, “Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll be OK.” And then you hear or see something. Maybe it’s a big thing, like the Dobbs decision or the October 7 attacks. But it doesn’t have to be. Maybe you hear about a heat wave in Asia. Or see police fighting with protesters. Or maybe somebody you know, somebody you thought knew better, surprises you by repeating some hateful political talking point about trans people or immigrants.

And in an instant the bottom falls out. That guarded confidence you felt a minute ago is gone, and suddenly all you can think is: “We’re doomed. We’re on a track to some unthinkable dystopia, and nothing I do makes any difference. People don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to them, because I can’t even imagine what they were thinking to begin with.”

I experience this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so stupid or self-centered or short-sighted?

We don’t usually talk about these experiences, because it feels like confessing a weakness, or like a virus we don’t want to pass on. If I’m panicking inside, I don’t want to tell you about it, because I don’t want you to panic too. But I think we do need to talk about this, for at least two reasons. First, because when this happens to you, it’s really unpleasant. Despair is one of the most painful emotions out there, so the less time you can spend in it, the better.

And second, it’s debilitating. When that sinkhole opens up or that volcano of rage erupts, it’s hard to keep doing any of the constructive things you ordinarily do. And if you do manage to keep doing them, you probably aren’t doing them very well. I know that when I’m coming from a place of fear or anger, when I’m running away from an internal panic, I have bad judgment and find it hard to connect with people. In situations where I’d like to communicate confidently and persuasively, what tends to come through instead is my anxiety and fear. So despair, depression, and anger tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies. If you and everyone like you are panicking, that in itself can be something to panic about.

Ever since February I’ve been wandering around asking people if they recognize this experience and, if so, what they do about it. I’ve learned two things from those conversations: First, not a single person has told me that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And second, from the remedies they suggest, I gather that most people experience this as a passing mood, a short-term unpleasantness that they just need to get over.  So I’ve heard suggestions like: Eat something. Get a good night’s sleep. Go walk in the woods. Watch a movie. Get a big hug from somebody. Snuggle with a pet.

In essence, these remedies treat a poor mental state like a malfunctioning device. You don’t need to understand exactly what went wrong. Just unplug it and then plug it in again. Reboot, and hope the problem goes away. Most of the time, it does.

But sometimes it doesn’t. Or it goes away for a day or a week, and then the whole pattern repeats itself: You hear that the bird flu might lead to another pandemic, read about another species going extinct, hear somebody else confidently proclaim their racism or sexism, and the roller coaster takes another dive.

At this point, you need more than just a distracting hobby or a comfort animal. You need a strategy.

The beginning of strategy is noticing patterns. One pattern I’ve noticed in my life is a weekly cycle. I post my political blog on Monday mornings. And even though I’ve been assembling it all week, Monday morning usually requires about six hours of intense concentration. In particular, it’s emotional concentration, because I test each sentence for all the ways it could be misunderstood, and all the unintentional insults I might be dealing out to readers who come to this topic with life experiences different from mine. By Monday afternoon my empathy is exhausted, including my empathy for myself. So Monday evenings are difficult for me, and I’m highly vulnerable to these kinds of collapses.

I’ve tried a number of remedies, but the one that works best is simple acceptance: This is what Monday evening feels like. Notice it, accept it, don’t make it worse, but also don’t take it too seriously. I get through Monday, try not to expect much out of myself on Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning I’m almost always fine.

In the Carlos Castenada books, Don Juan talks about stalking your dysfunctions the way that a hunter stalks prey. In this case, you may need to stalk your fear, despair, anger, or other negativity. Find out where it hangs out, where it comes from, where it goes, and plan your strategy accordingly.

But sometimes even that doesn’t work. And at this point, you might wonder whether you’re in the territory of that old vaudeville joke: A guy walks in to his doctor’s office and says “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” And the doctor responds: “Don’t do that.”

Does it hurt when you pay attention to the news? Don’t do that. Stop looking. Stop caring about elections or the planet or global injustice or anything beyond what you need to get through your day. That’s the question Jackson Browne was wrestling with in the opening words: I’ve been living with my eyes open. Was that a mistake?

Now, for me, not paying attention to the news would mean shutting down my blog, which has become a major part of my identity. But even without that consideration, I also think it would betray my Unitarian values.

As Unitarians, I don’t believe we’re supposed to be fat and happy. I think we’re supposed to be active, well-informed citizens. I think we’re supposed to be involved in the give-and-take of democracy. And even to lead those discussions to the extent that we’re able. As a religious movement, we take seriously Thomas Jefferson’s warning: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

But that said, sometimes you do need to step back and let the world manage without you for a week or two. We all, I think, have inside us that sad little fetus Robert Penn Warren was talking about, the one that wants to stay warm in its not knowing. Once in a while, we need to show ourselves some compassion and take a little time to comfort that fetus.

And sometimes the negative pattern you’ve stalked to its lair is obsessiveness. So you need to ration your attention and set up circuit breakers to keep yourself from going down a rabbit hole. More than one person has told me that they need to enforce a rigorous bedtime to keep themselves from doomscrolling their news feeds far into the night. You can make those kinds of adjustments without permanently turning your back on the world.

I want to devote the rest of my time this morning to thinking about prevention. Short of ignoring the world’s problems, is there some regular practice, some mental hygiene, some healthy relationship to the news, that can prevent these sorts of mood collapses?

I think there is. But to understand it, we need a more precise diagnosis of the problem.

If you look at the kinds of responses I’ve mentioned — paralyzing fear, despair, depression, and annihilating anger — I think they’re all symptoms of broken denial. You keep telling yourself that some unpleasant thing can’t happen, and then you get reminded that it can. So you get angry or depressed or fall into despair.

That’s what happened to me in February. I had been telling myself, and telling my readers, that the American people are basically sensible, and they’ll rise to this challenge. Every voter starts paying attention on their own schedule, so at any given moment they might tell a pollster all kinds of things. But come November, most voters will look around, figure things out, and do the right thing.

But then for a week in February, nothing mattered but Biden’s age. And I was forced to admit: Maybe not.

So if the root problem is denial, then the obvious solution is to live without denial. But that’s a lot easier said than done. Perfect perception of reality is not given to human beings. We all piece together our worldviews from a few facts, some reasonable deductions, a little hearsay, a few wild guesses, and maybe a bit of wishful thinking. No matter how hard you work on your picture of reality, the world is going to continue to surprise you.

And figuring out how to respond to those surprises gets tricky. Take my response to the Hur report. That mood crash should have told me that I had been in denial about something. But what exactly? What was the belief that events had exposed as dysfunctional? And what was the right belief to replace it with? It’s really easy to get this wrong, and many people do.

Here’s one way I could have thought it through: What got me in trouble, what got exposed as denial, was my belief that the American people are going to do the right thing in November.

So maybe the correct view, the thing I need to admit to myself, is that the American people are going to do the wrong thing. The Republic is doomed. We’re going to vote to end democracy once and for all. That’s just how it is.

I see people do this all the time: If my positive belief is denial, then the exactly opposite negative belief must be true. Climate change is going to destroy civilization. Rational thought can never compete with religious extremism. Humanity will never make any progress on poverty or war or bigotry. We’re all doomed.

I say I could have thought it through that way, but it’s actually worse than that: I did. For several days I tormented myself with those kinds of negative thoughts.

But eventually I realized that this kind of thinking was just the flip side of the same denial. Because my true mistake, the conclusion that needed replacing, wasn’t that the election will have a happy outcome. My true mistake was telling myself that I know what’s going to happen. Jumping from “I know things are going to turn out well” to “I know things are going to turn out badly” wasn’t undoing my denial, it was maintaining it.

Because here’s the scary, humbling, but true thought that I was actually denying: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can guess. I can speculate. I can argue that one outcome is more likely than another. But when you come down to it, I just don’t know.

I don’t know who’s going to win the election. I don’t know if Trump will ever face justice. I don’t know how bad climate change will get before we turn it around, or if we even will turn it around. I don’t know what future wars we might find ourselves fighting. I don’t know what new plagues are out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out how to organize humanity to offer everyone a chance at a good life. I don’t know how long it will take the arc of the Universe to bend towards justice, or if it’s even bending that way at all. Pick any problem or issue you care about, and I can’t promise you anything. Because I just don’t know.

And that, I think, is the essence of the problem we all face: How do we keep going, keep striving, keep doing whatever we can to give humanity its best chance to thrive — without falsely promising ourselves that whatever we’re doing is certain to work?

My best response to that question is actually in one of my previous talks, the one I gave during the Covid lockdown, when we were meeting over Zoom with the congregation in La Crosse. Remember? I talked about hope.

My hope at the time was that if you remembered anything from that talk, it would be this: Hope is neither optimism nor pessimism. Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future, but hope is an attitude towards the present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise you an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying.

So in conclusion, that’s the mental hygiene I’ve been trying to live by these last few months, and that I recommend: Cultivate your capacity for hope, and regularly exercise your ability to live and function in the presence of uncertainty.

Whether we’re talking about the election, climate change, some other public issue, or even some challenge in your personal life, try to avoid both optimism and pessimism. Try to avoid either promising yourself a positive outcome or getting lost in some negative scenario. Just keep striving for the best outcome you can reasonably imagine, and then let things happen as they will.

We don’t get to choose the future, but we do get to choose our own actions.  

Choose well.

Closing Words

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance. -- Benjamin Franklin