As I was reading from my various and sundry online newspapers this morning – something I do most days – I marveled at the variety of human events and experiences that each newspaper was able to compress in a relatively few pages. And, in truth, even with the compression, the total gamut of what even one newspaper has to offer is too much for me to absorb. So, this morning, I did what I always do: I skimmed the titles of all the different articles of all the different publications and read only those articles that were of particular interest to me.
In general, I tend to focus on articles that deal with domestic political affairs and international affairs. In today’s world, there are more explosive tension- pocket events occurring and more situations filled with abrasive stimuli surrounding us than I remember ever experiencing before. All the mass shootings, not one, but two major wars, all the different disputes in the U.S. Congress, all the animosity being generated by the coming U.S. elections as well as the erratic explosive climate events that are impacting us on an everyday basis. It’s really a pretty intense time in which to be living.
The question is to what extent does reading about all these different situations give us a sense of psychological control over them? The answer is usually not much. The mass shootings that occur are so random that there is no way of predicting where they are going to happen. The good news is that in comparison to the happenings in the daily lives of most people, they are at a frequency level where it is still highly unlikely that they are going to directly touch the life of any one given individual. But still, one can think rationally about mass shootings on a statistical level, but on a subjective emotional level, each person killed is like a dagger to one’s own heart. Deep down, there is no escaping the notion that it could have been members of one’s family or one’s romantic partner or one’s dear friends………or me.
As for the two wars, one of them involves two peoples, the Jews and the Arabs, whose conflicts and mutual antipathy go back hundreds of years. The latest war is being fought by the Israelis and the Palestinians, and when it is over, after the Israelis crush the Palestinians temporarily, the Palestinians will probably regroup, and the cycle of violence will start all over again. Unless one wants to volunteer for the Israeli Defense Forces – I assume my readers aren’t Palestinian – there is little one can do to influence the course of this war.
As for the war between the Ukraine and Russia, Putin is determined to recreate the Russian empire of Peter the Great. It is his fantasy that has propelled this war, and one can only speculate what would happen if Putin got sick or if something else were to happen to him. Would the war continue to have staying power? At any rate, this is a war that is even more remote than the Israel-Hamas war in terms of the average outsider’s influence over it.
In terms of the disputes in Congress, to the extent that they affect us, we can gain some sense of control by voting for the candidates who best represent our interests in the next election cycle. One problem with adopting this stance is that there are problems that require urgent care now and that if we wait until election time to change the makeup of Congress, it might be too late. Ukraine and Israel require funding now. Ukraine particularly requires ammunition if it is to continue fighting. And a bipartisan committee of senators passed a bill to deal with the border problems that the House Republicans are stonewalling over, even though they are members of the party that have been making such a big stink about this issue, because Trump is afraid of any legislation passing that appears to give a victory to Biden. Actually, this same stonewalling is the reason that Israel and Ukraine aren’t getting the funding and the weaponry and the ammunition they need. To this extent, the average American is again left feeling powerless.
There are certain disputes within the American body politic that do not require such an urgent response. In particular, I am thinking of the issues of abortion and guns. It’s not that I approve of the consequences of getting rid of Roe vs. Wade or of maintaining such loose gun laws. On the contrary I am very pro-choice and very pro-gun-regulation. It’s just that neither issue has quite the explosive life-or-death consequences of a bloody war, if it is not dealt with right away.
Nevertheless, by no means does this mean that Americans don’t use these issues as vehicles to gain a sense of control in their lives. These are issues that Americans do strategize about in order to make their lives more consonant with their beliefs. All over the United States, various elections, referenda and bills are constantly being put before different communities to test the popularity of different positions on these issues, and, in some cases, to make certain small changes.
Finally, there is the matter of climate change. For some Americans, the issue still seems very remote, and there is little that they feel they can do in order to fight it. In other words, they deal with their lack of ability to have control over the government and over large corporations in terms of the polluting of the environment, by not thinking about it too much. A relatively few do get involved with environmental organizations, and through their involvement they learn how little they can actually do.
So, for most people, reading the newspapers pulls them out of the numbness of their lives in the experiential vacuum of modern technological society. It acts as a kind of magical thinking that awareness is by itself a form of constructive affirmative action. Of course, this isn’t true, but to quote a famous Argentinian folk song, “Life is sad when it is lived without an illusion.”
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