NOVEMBER 6, MONDAY

NEWS

Even here in the peace and quiet of Naousa news of the world seeps in. When I first started taking students to India in 1973, you couldn’t fly to India from Charlotte or even Atlanta. You had to fly from New York City. We took the train to New York City from Asheville in which we were able to sit in an observation car. We got stuck in a snowstorm in Washington and took a walk from Union Station up to the Capitol in a foot of snow. It was a long slow trip. Once in India it took ten days to receive a letter and ten days to answer. We were at the end of the earth. There was no news. But there was a weekly International edition of Time magazine that appeared in the luxury hotels in Delhi. We were hungry for news and could catch up on a week’s news by buying Time. Now the news arrives everywhere in the world instantly by Internet, popping up as a notification on my iPad screen and Time has become a magazine of commentary on the news or a source of back ground stories, rather than a source of news because it is too slow.

So sitting here in the sunshine on this white porch I haven’t escaped the news. I hear it just when you do wherever you are and faster if you rely on television. The news this week was Mike Johnson becoming Speaker of the House and Trump’s trial in for fraud in New York City.

American polarization still touches me, but because I am sitting with Greek voices drifting up from the street below, none of whom are aware of Mike Johnson and don’t have Donald Trump on their mind, I can feel a little detached from the polarization in the United States. Even the news that Trump is leading Biden in the polls in critical states and that people somehow think he could handle foreign policy and the economy better seems so distant. From this distance it all sounds cockeyed and nuts, but not somehow threatening. It seems unreal.

So even at this distance, not doing anything here to write about I am back to thinking about the tensions between MAGA people and progressive liberals. Somehow I feel so detached that I think that I might be able to think more clearly about how I can deal personally with this tension. Tomorrow I will probably write about it with no hope of resolving the tension for anyone else but hoping to find a way to defuse the tension personally so that when I come home in three weeks it won’t irritate me as much and won’t hang over me like a huge black cloud.