President Trump has been out of office for almost 160 days. During that time, I mostly paid attention to the actions of Congress. I focused on the COVID relief bills, the voting rights bills (federal and state), climate-related actions, and Supreme Court decisions. I also followed the lethal attacks on a woman’s right to control her body and an LGBTQ+ person’s right to define the terms of their existence.
I paid too little attention to the COVID situation in South America, Africa, Europe, or Asia (excluding the death tolls in India and Brazil and a vague awareness of the Delta variant), and I paid zero attention to the COVID situation in Australia or the Pacific Islands.
Post-Trump, I’ve reduced my news intake considerably. I have, in terms of Voltaire, taken to cultivating my garden. I try to avoid “the three great evils [of] l’ennui, le vice, et le besoin” (though all things in moderation, I suppose) while also practicing gratitude and kindness (and too often failing at both).
In Candide, Voltaire’s “honest Turk” presumes “that they who meddle with the administration of public affairs sometimes perish miserably, and that they deserve it.” The more I ignore the nastiness of the narcissists in Washington D.C., the more I tend to agree with Voltaire.
Of course, it’s easy for me to ignore the goings-on in our nation’s capital. I’m a white, cisgender, heterosexual male with a full-time job, clear citizenship status, and a fixed-rate mortgage in a rural village in Vermont.
I don’t have to worry about ending my unwanted pregnancy. My skin color probably won’t cause my untimely death at the hands of police officers, biased medical professionals, violent racists, or self-appointed vigilantes. I can leave my house without fear of unwarranted deportation. I can use a public restroom without risking my physical safety. I don’t have a greedy landlord who can jack up my rent. I live far from rising sea levels and in a region that (so far) has been lucky enough to avoid massive droughts, storms, and wildfires.
My ability to ignore Washington D.C. is, simply put, evidence of my privilege.
But it is also evidence of my age. At forty-four years old, I don’t have the passion for politics I once had. I still get mad at the lies and the lying liars who tell them, and I still get inspired by faithful public servants. But the reduction of our representative democracy to an idiotic, self-obsessed punditocracy has destroyed my ability to pay attention.
Add the Republican party’s decades-long nosedive into cynicism, anti-democratic fascism, and blatant white-supremacy to the Democratic party’s inability to pass crucial legislation like a $15 minimum wage or the For the People Act, and you’ll sympathize with my withdrawal from daily politics.
Thankfully, with President Biden in the White House and the Democratic Party (at least temporarily) in control of Congress, I don’t have to wake up terrified to read the headlines each morning. I don’t expect a pre-emptive nuclear strike on North Korea, a national ban on Muslim travelers, or a federal boondoggle on behalf of fossil fuel companies.
In our Post-Trump moment, instead of sparking my anxiety disorder with a daily deep-dive into all the ways our government is ruining the present and future, I choose to sit on my front porch, crack open a locally brewed beer, pick at my ukulele, and escape into a book of fiction.
And for that, I am thankful.