When I was a kid, I found comfort in the predictable rhythm of the news programs my mother consumed. In Minneapolis, particularly on bad weather days, WCCO Radio was always on. In the evenings, the 6 and 10 PM broadcasts brought the same anchors and faces, a sense of familiarity into the home. She never missed them. I remember it being calming. First, because it meant I was with my mom and felt safe. Second, because she never seemed upset or worried about any of it, or if she did, she hid it well. Other than the assassinations of JFK and MLK, I don’t remember anything the news actually said. Just her calm face, and the two of us together.
Today I have a hard time listening to, reading, or watching any news. So much of it agitates, and confirms whatever view I already hold as morally superior. It thin-slices my rivals. Either tacitly or with purpose, my neighbors become fascists, “libtards,” Nazis. News, newsletters, TikTok videos: civilization is collapsing and must be saved from HIM! HER! IT! Blame Trump. Blame Reagan. Blame Obama. Blame you. RNC, DNC, DSA: all bad, all evil, all good, ruined and ruptured. Dylan wrote, “Ain’t no use jiving, ain’t no use joking, everything is broken.”
What if Dylan is right, and everything is broken? Politics. Media. Food. Medicine. Capitalism. The courts. The environment. All broken. By broken, I mean they don’t function or operate in ways that consistently produce the best results. In aggregate, they fail their remit. They come up short.
“Seems like every time you stop and turn around, something else just hit the ground.”
But what if that’s not all true? What if, as Steven Pinker argues, the world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being? That things are good, and getting better all the time? Based on some pretty convincing research, we overestimate how bad things are, and ignore the evidence that things across almost all areas of human society are good, though far from perfect. But sometimes ugly realities are impossible to negotiate. Sometimes things really, really are as bad as we fear, because we’re in it.
Bad to worse was my fate from 2017 to 2022. From the moment I was arrested and taken to jail, I was overcome by dire anxiety, and the news of my potential future was as dark as I could imagine. If a jury decided against me, I would go away for more than a decade. Bad news produces anxiety, which is a hostage-taker from within. It, or rather we, seize almost every resource to amplify the message of doom. During those long nights in jail, whatever healthy, lucid thoughts I might normally have had, abandoned me. Everything was broken. Everything felt helpless.
Sitting in a Scott County jail cell with no windows was, in some respects, one of the most deeply illuminating passages of my adult life. There was nothing I could do to change what was happening, at least on the surface. That’s why the slightest expression of kindness toward me was so remarkably loud and obvious. A Scott County guard brought me a message from a former sheriff, who also worked, for fun, at the Festival, and had firsthand information that made what I was accused of impossible. He knew I had been maligned. He asked the guard to treat me kindly, and to let me know that a lot of people on the outside already knew this accusation was wrong.
In the moments after the guard left my cell, I felt a little better. After all that had happened in the previous 24 hours, that small gesture just made a huge difference. I decided then that I would return the effort by treating everyone I met from that point forward with generosity and gratitude. Maybe it’s hard to understand. While being accused of an ugly crime and arrested was an appalling injustice, at the same time, nearly everyone I would encounter would give me a chance to practice something important to me, something I’d been quietly working at for years. Radical kindness.
I follow a teaching I never talk about, one that rests in a very private corner of myself. It animates the way I think. It’s from one of the oldest religions still practiced today, out of India. It’s Jainism, if you care to look it up. To me it’s less a belief system than a discipline, built around doing the least possible harm, to any living thing, in thought, word, or deed. But it starts within. Internally felt, externally expressed as radical non-violence and kindness. I’ve been vegan, or vegetarian, most of my adult life. I go out of my way not to hurt, harm, or needlessly kill anything, insects included. It sees every living thing as a fellow traveler, to be regarded and respected. I don’t do it well, but it helps me move through the world.
What if, I thought, everything was a chance to practice. Instead of seeing the guards as nameless overlords, or meddling public servants in the halls of criminal indifference, I treated them as good, spoke to them as good, acted like they were good. After someone took the effort to call a guard on my behalf, then I could certainly respond with something better than my own indifference. Being nice, or kind didn’t get me out of that cell any faster.
Some years ago, my wife and I were in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. We’d come out of a rare, but particularly challenging, passage in our marriage. We were fine, but there was still a hangover of uncertainty, wounds from our mutual transgressions. After bad news and years of uncomfortable conversations, we took to the road to reconnect. One perfect afternoon, we hiked up an embankment trail in the park. In the late afternoon October sunshine we ended up on a quiet high point overlooking the vast, lunar-like landscape. We sat for a long time in the late afternoon sun, talking, not talking, just looking. Whatever noise there was in our hearts was gone.
It’s easy to think we needed to be in a place like that to feel the way we did. A beautiful, relaxing setting may make it easier to hear and see something good. But nothing in me fundamentally changed on that ridge. The thing that generated my impatience, my judgment, my irritation, all of it, was still sitting right there with me. As the old saying goes, wherever you go, there you are. The ridge didn’t disarm me, it just made it easier to choose.
Being in jail made it harder to choose something good, but it was a choice that was available to me. It wasn’t a beautiful setting. There were ugly walls, stainless steel toilets, and so much anxiety. It was unjust, but so what.
This brings me back home, so to speak, to the world I live in. While things may be getting better all the time, it can still seem like everything is broken. While I was in jail I was able to refocus my attention on doing good things. I was still locked in jail, alone, and anxious. Choosing good may change the experience, but not the reality.
I found three young birds these past few weeks, sick, seizing, unable to fly. I couldn’t save them. What I could do was move them, out of the glaring sun, off the pavement, into the shade under the rhubarb leaves in the yard, somewhere cool, peaceful and quiet. One died there in my hands. The other two died later, under the leaves.
I didn’t fix anything. I knew they were going to die. I did it because gentleness was the only thing left available to give, and giving it was still mine to choose, same as it was with the guards, same as it was in that cell.
Is everything broken? Maybe, honestly, my answer depends on the moment. Frankly, I don’t have much energy for pessimism, of seeing the bad everywhere I look. It’s short-sighted and depleting. But bad news and broken everything seems to play well in the press, it stalks our defenses, convincing too many that it’s all shit.
One more thing about those dying robins, and how few of them are in our garden this summer. We discovered that someone in the neighborhood has most likely left rat poison out, set thinking it only kills rats. Of course that’s wrong. It kills everything. The answer to the deaths, to finding the source of their misery, starts by noticing the suffering, by refusing to look away.
My mother never went looking for what was wrong in the world. She let the news come to her, at six and at ten, and then she turned it off and made dinner. I used to think that was avoidance. Now I think it might have been the same thing I’m trying to do with a dying robin, or a guard, or a cell with no windows. Not looking away. Just refusing to let it be the only thing you see.
From the poem A Brief For The Defense, by Jack Gilbert.
“If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight.” ©Jack Gilbert
