In the, well, months leading up to the election, I stopped interacting with the news. I had listened to an episode on the podcast 80,000 hours, “Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news” and I thought, exactly! It’s the sensational news that sells, so that’s what I’m being pummeled with, and I don’t need this in my life. I have a few diagnosed mental health challenges, so I felt justified in protecting myself. Besides, my husband can fill me in on anything important. BOY, did he fill me in last Wednesday.

Now it’s a week after the election, and the parks around me in NYC are on fire. This fire has been infiltrating my dreams - I am in a meadow with my husband and there is a fire cresting the hill in front of us, and I wonder, do I stand to face it, or do I turn my back and pretend it’s not there, until I am burned? Then I wake up sweating.

When I told my friend Jim over dinner at a Greek restaurant that I wasn’t reading the news, he warned me that’s what the German people were doing when the Nazi’s were in power, committing mass murder. That is a whole complex topic, and he was generalizing, but this stuck with me. I worry that so many people are just exhausted and hopeless after this election, that they want to protect themselves and give up, just as I did. But is the moment we want to turn away precisely the moment we need to be most aware? Do we really want to fulfill the evildoers’ wishes to make the country ignorant?

I’m going to sign back up for 1440, an unbiased newsletter delivered by email every day. I’m also going to subscribe to my local newspaper. Let’s see if this is enough news for me. Maybe I can find a balance between my mental state and bearing witness to what’s going to happen next. And let’s hope the press will remain free. At the very least people need to be watching out for that.