If you’re, like me, one of the people who ingests news with your morning coffee (or reads those banner headlines that pop up on your phone a hundred or so times a day), you too—whatever your political persuasion—have likely been making regular visits to medical websites for self-help tips. After each jolt of adrenaline you practice the ten steps, which you by now have memories, that help lower your blood pressure or the eight steps that increase your endorphin production. Which works, until the next headline.
I finally decided that getting out of Dodge, at least for a couple of days, would calm my nervous system. So I went on a road trip across the desert, a sizable chunk of land with fewer people than my neighborhood. Cut off from the news feed as I drove across the landscape, I marveled at the giant hills, the wide blue skies, and vast stretches of sand which were only sporadically and disconcertingly interrupted by tract-housing development and strip malls that appeared to be transplanted from the midwest circa 1990. And I won’t lie, I positively wept at the billboards advertising houses for the price of a car where I live.
As I crossed into the next state and my phone’s reception came back on, news banners started pinging like a winning hand on a video poker machine. Headline alerts about this awful political nightmare, linked to opinion pieces railing at both sides. So many of them quoted fear and trepidation about our fellow Americans with whom we disagree.
I guess this is the coming normal, an era of continuous disruption with little resolution. This country feels chaotic, and hypervigilance is the new normal. It might be some time after things calm down and he is finally out (yes, I was With Her, duh), and we again find harmony. And in the meantime, we will have already paid too heavy a price. At full retail.