OCTOBER 25, TUESDAY

POLITICS

When Kathe got sick almost two years ago she no longer wanted to watch the news. Until then she watched MSNBC religiously and was very much caught in the tensions between MAGA people and Liberals. She couldn’t tear herself away from the TV and the fear and anger that the news produced. This was in spite of having a German passport and not being able to vote.

When she stopped watching the news on television, so did I, and I’ve almost stopped watching television of any kind since she died. I finally stopped paying for television. I haven’t missed it.

I stopped watching because I wanted to disconnect from the righteous anger that liberals I was watching felt and conveyed to me. Because of give money each month to Emily’s List in support of liberal women candidates I am on Democratic donor lists. I get twenty or thirty pleas a day by people who are trying to whip up fear and anger in order to induce me to contribute. But fear and anger seem to me to be central to the furious partisanship that divides America and so I refuse to get sucked in. Each day I spend fifteen minutes deleting all those emails without reading them. I believe that women are generally saner and more compassionate politicians than men and so refuse to contribute in any other way than to Emily’s List which supports liberal Democratic women. I’ll vote when my friend Owen Bailey takes me to the polls and trust his judgment on whom to vote for. But otherwise I don’t want to be involved.

But I can’t escape. All day long the news comes to me through notifications from the Washington Post and the New York Times and Apple News. Print news is quieter and more balanced and doesn’t rile me up quite as much. So I know what is going on, I just don’t want to be caught in American polarization.

I am sure there was polarization in Morocco but I couldn’t read Arabic or French and so was not caught in whatever fury was under the surface there. And being far away from the United States made the tensions we have here less compelling.

But now I am back with three weeks until the election and it is getting harder and harder to pay no attention.

Am I hiding my head in the sand or am I being completely sane? I don’t know. But at least I’m not furious all of the time.