A Seed of Clearer Vision

curiosity > consumption

Pulse check: it has only been ten days and we are tired.

I don’t plan to continuously circle the drain of this election. That’s one of the things that has me feeling so weary to begin with. It’s the repetition of it all. The endlessness. The inescapability, the noise, ad nauseum.

I also don’t yet know how to separate my life from the news of the day. It colors everything, even me. Maybe eventually it will diffuse more effortlessly into the background? (Also a scary thought…) I understand the impulse to bury my head in the sand and focus on my life alone.

Earlier this week, I tossed out a question on Instagram about how we’re currently engaging with the news. Almost 2,000 people said they are O-V-E-R it, totally overwhelmed, mid-range depressed, full-time mad. When I asked who we’re holding onto as our go-to sources, the *vast* majority named Sharon McMahon, with runners up including Heather Cox Richardson, MoNews, and Jon Stewart.

Surprise! This bugged me. Not because I have beef with any of those names - I follow all of them on social media. I’ve noodled my feelings for days, confusing myself (and maybe you) in the process of understanding why I can’t let anything just be, including this. My knee-jerk reaction is always to pounce on the problematic nature of insulating ourselves with similarity, which for most of us includes grasping, even subconsciously, for whiteness. I then spiraled out over the differences between news, social media, journalism, influencers, legacy outlets, indie joints, etc., to the point of pain. I couldn’t accurately pinpoint the source of the problem.

Last night before bed, I read a few pages of the memoir Airplane Mode, by Shahnaz Habib, about the joys and complexities of international travel. She writes that it is predominantly Americans who travel for leisure, and that white people, in particular, are prone to overlooking the privilege this requires.

“How intrepid you are as a traveler depends, at least partly, on how entitled you feel to travel. On whether there’s an army base nearby with soldiers from your country. On whether guidebooks are written to ease your path through the world.”

As an avid traveler herself, Habib isn’t throwing shade at the practice. She is turning on the lights.

As often happens with good writing, her words helped me connect the dots in other areas. My impulse to urge us (again) toward broadening our source base is less about the news we are consuming and much more about our posture as we fumble through an increasingly murky world. Maybe it’s not the distinctions between news and media that really matter. Or, at a minimum, maybe this isn’t what matters most. Reading a single page about the my own privilege as an international traveler had me simultaneously squirming in discomfort and thrilled at the prospect of hopping on a plane again. It’s not simple as “this is bad” vs. “this is good.”

What does this have to do with the news, Shannan?