Like much of America, I’ve been pretty glued to my phone’s news app for the last three days.
(As a quick aside, my news app of choice is Reuters. I find them to be about as unbiased as a news outlet can be, as well as consistently accurate and independently fact-checked. If you’re sick of severely biased media on any point of the political spectrum, I highly recommend switching over to Reuters.)
But I digress.
Rarely has it felt so important to remain up-to-date with the goings on in our country. Since Wednesday’s insurrection at the Capitol—and, equally if not more significant, the results of the Georgia runoff election—the situation has been evolving on what feels like a minute-by-minute basis. Security threats, conspiracies, impeachments, gross injustices—it’s all swirling around us constantly.
I have to take time away. I have to breathe, to release the outcomes, and to restore.
I spent upwards of five hours on Wednesday laser-focused on a rotating cast of news anchors, desperate for any new piece of information. Unable to focus on anything else, body tense, grinding my teeth.
Of course I was. We all were. We had to be—it was an historic moment for our country, one that our collective consciousness will never forget.
But as the insurrectionists dispersed—with extremely little resistance and seemingly few immediate consequences, I’ll add—I began to feel the psychological repercussions of my insatiable information binge over the previous five hours.
Despair. Apathy. Total burnout.
We cannot afford to plunge ourselves into this state of exhaustion. We—and by “we,” I particularly mean other white, cisgender men like myself—cannot afford to drive ourselves to a point where we can no longer fight the fight that we are ultimately responsible for starting.
Let me be absolutely clear: It is not the responsibility of BIPOC people to stand up to the white supremacists, the antisemites, the terrorists who stormed the Capitol. To believe so would be to see this conflict as “us” versus “them.” No. This needs to be an “us” versus “us” problem; we need to give space for those who are at risk to protect themselves from hate and violence.
Our culture of white and male supremacy—whether explicit or implicit—gave birth to that insurrection. Sure, Trump-the-supervillain may have instigated it, and he certainly didn’t try to quell it. But we’re joking ourselves if we believe that he was solely responsible for it. That responsibility lies on our white-dominant culture, on our generations-long complicity, and on the implicit political systems that have emboldened and cultivated Trumpism.
The fight is a marathon, not a sprint. We have to be ready to show up for the long haul and advocate for the ones we’ve spent centuries ignoring and silencing. And we can’t do that effectively or consistently if we are giving away our vitality to a constant news binge.
We must balance the acknowledgement that our ability to walk away from the news and rejuvenate is a huge privilege, with the knowledge that, if we don’t give ourselves space and time to rest, we will not be able to show up as allies for those who need us. For those who will continue to need us in the years to come.