How is a journalist supposed to turn down the volume on the world? Especially if consuming the news every day is part of the job — an orientation cemented into habit since the late 1980s.
I find myself asking myself this question a lot these days.
Since returning to work after a peaceful holiday season in which I buried myself in books and stayed away from the daily reminders of a world in chaos, I find myself living in a perpetual state of stunned numbness.
I had hoped the benefits of unplugging over the holidays — that reserve of equanimity and general sense of well-being after time off — would last at least until the end of January. But the world already feels overwhelming and we’re only halfway through the month.
The military operation in Venezuela to remove President Nicolás Maduro. The surge of ICE into Minneapolis after the shooting of Renee Good and the daily barrage of images and videos of city residents and federal agents clashing in the streets. The saber-rattling from Donald Trump about wresting Greenland away from long-time ally, Denmark.
The country-wide protests across Iran as the world wonders if this is finally the beginning of the end of the theocracy that has ruled that country since the 1979 revolution.
Meanwhile, New Mexico state lawmakers are returning to Santa Fe this week to debate and pass a state budget that will attempt to plug holes in funding for services and programs for the low-income and vulnerable that were targeted by the Trump administration.
It’s all a bit much.
For a person like me in a job like mine, one cannot go cold turkey on keeping up with the news. I understand why many Americans have done it. The news can make you feel insane.
My challenge is to re-calibrate the balance I’ve struck over most of my life between the world and my personal life to stave off burn out. Burnout, always a threat to people working in the news industry, is even a graver menace these days, as the country and world lurch from crisis to crisis.
As I mark 35 years in the news business, I am realizing upon greater reflection that the way my parents raised me has set me up for burn out — but also to be resilient.
In addition to learning to read the hometown daily newspaper every day, my parents encouraged me to read books, admire art and consume music — and, in doing that, they encouraged me to discover what nourished me, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually.
I need to remember this as I move through this year. Take a step back from the news and do what I love.
Already, this year I’ve finished a book by the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
Satantango, published in 1985, was Hungarian László Krasznahorkai’s debut novel and tells the tale of a village of laborers living mundane, even desperate lives in a rural area (ostensibly in Hungary at the end of the Soviet era).
They become excited after hearing a rumor that someone whom they admired and believed to have extraordinary powers but who died is alive and soon to arrive in their hamlet. However, it is unclear whether the man is “a prophet, or the devil, or just a violent con-man,” as one reviewer put it.
The story is timeless. It describes the powerful desire desperate humans have for finding hope where they can, and how easily it can bear fruit or be exploited. It’s a story that could be about today or about life thousands of years ago.
Then there was the excited call I got from my son recently after he saw John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live at a local theater. A science fiction cult classic, the plot goes like this: An alien race has taken over Earth and is controlling humans through subliminal communications with messages that say “obey,” “consume,” “don’t question authority,” “money is your God”, “stay asleep,” among other things. The aliens pose as the movers and shakers in society, the uber wealthy, and are controlling the economy and influencing the markets. That is, until a vagrant discovers them after finding special sunglasses and he decides he has to warn the world. Violence ensues.
All I gotta say is They Live might have come out nearly 40 years ago, but it feels relevant to today. Also, it was fun to see all the 1980s fashion.
These are small things, I know, but I feel better just telling you about them.
I guess the trick to living in a chaotic world is to find what you love and do it.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.