Campaign is ruining my inner peace
It was ten ’til nine and I was running all over the place, turning over stuff and rifling through closets, trying to find my yoga mat. This was a crisis. More than any other time I can recall, I needed the dark, warm cocoon of the yoga studio to calm my nerves and restore peace to my jumpy brain.
For days, I’d been waking feeling anxious and jangled, with a sense of trouble following me like a barking dog. I stopped drinking coffee and ate turkey sandwiches for breakfast, hoping the tryptophan would settle things. But the unease continued.
I knew what I had to do.
I have reached the point where I have to stop following the presidential campaign. All the TV coverage, the debates, the interviews, the clips on the Web, the commentary – all of it has become just too much. I’ve shut it off.
And to think I used to cover this for a living. During my years as a TV journalist, it’s what I did most every working day for years. Local, statewide, national races – I was the reporter who chased the candidates, asked them questions and covered their speeches. I was good at it because I understood it and found it fascinating.
But we’re in a different time now, and maybe I’m different, too. Lately, the discourse of the campaigns – all of them – has become so noisy, harsh and indecent that following it has turned me into a Nervous Nellie.
It’s been building for a while, but things finally snapped for me last week. We saw one candidate question the manhood of an opponent based on the size of his hands and feet; we saw another toss water around in snide reference to the tendency of another candidate to perspire; we saw a young female African-American protester being shoved out of a campaign rally by shouting men.
If I were to continue to watch, I might start a new bad habit or two, just to calm down.
“My eye starts twitching when I watch this,” said my friend Gina, who considers herself a bit high-strung to begin with. Like Gina, my baseline is to worry, to send my mind off to the far, catastrophic reaches of any scenario. The thing about this campaign, though, is that I didn’t have to imagine the horrors this has come to. It’s playing out on screen in real time, ramping up in vulgarity and hatred every news cycle.
This is not a political column, and I avoid writing about politics. You may infer from today’s piece where my anger lies. But whom I support or don’t support is beside the point.
This isn’t even about politics any more. The news channels are not covering the exchange of ideas or conflicting philosophies any more. They are chasing the eye-catching displays of buffoonery, hoping that viewers and ratings will follow.
I can’t take it any more. What I need is the quiet and calm of the yoga studio, where all I hear are the sounds of chanting monks and my own heart beating.
Unable to find the yoga mat that morning, I ordered another. It will arrive in a few days. Until then, screens are off. The stupidity will have to roll on without me.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.