A Year Without News?

Now seems like a good time to give up on the news. The wackos have won Washington and frankly, I don’t want to read about their campaign to trash American values, not to mention our economy.

I'm not saying the country is going to the dogs, because that would be unfair to dogs. Most canines I’ve encountered are smarter than the people taking over the federal government. More honest, too.

The bottom line is that the experience of continuing to read news wouldn’t be good for either my physical or mental health. So, I’m out. The plan is a year. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m not inexperienced in skipping daily news. In the four years since I retired, I’ve occasionally put “no news days” on my calendar. I’ve employed them every other day for a month or so in order to increase my productivity on various writing projects. Generally, these efforts were successful,. But I did sometimes find myself catching up on subsequent regular days, with the result that the net time savings wasn’t as great as it appeared.

Despite these mini-experiments with news withdrawal in the last few years, the experience will be a challenge for me, since news has always been a major part of my life.

As an young teenager I remember consistently acing Time Magazine’s annual news quiz (I think it was Time). I also read Newsweek, US News, and other publications. I of course also read the local paper, such as it was, and grabbed out of town publications whenever possible. Until the Internet came along, I was one of those people who always inspected newsstands.

In a year between high school and college I lived in Paris and read Le Monde and other local publications. I also purchased the International Herald-Tribune every day I could find it.

As an undergraduate in DC, I read both the Post and the Times, and as a graduate student in Boston I dropped the Post and added both the Herald and the Globe.

As a graduate student in then communist Romania, I did not read the local publications. I have ADD and these pathetic screeds were too much for me. Or, rather, too little.

Later, I was able to read the national edition of the Times everywhere I lived and when the Internet came along I switched to an electronic subscription.

The appearance of electronic media expanded my reach considerably. The LA Times was a favorite until they put up their pay wall. And many other publications. I’d often follow stories by going to the sites of the local papers. Very interesting. Also very time consuming.

Retirement changed things for me. I re-added the Post to my repertoire and also threw in a lot of international sites. Most important, I now had the time to try to rekindle my abilities in foreign languages, and began to once more read in French and Romanian, both of which quickly became easy. Bulgarian, a language I’d studied less thoroughly and from a country I’d not lived in, was much harder. But after a year or so I was at the point where I could read most stories without too much assistance from a dictionary. In the last few months, to accommodate my wife’s work, I’ve added Spanish. It’s been fairly easy to master (reading, not speaking) and I’ve become quite fascinated with Spain’s culture and politics.

Reading a lot of news in five languages every day had become very time consuming. It had also become less and less rewarding. That’s because of the politics.

I grew up in a strongly Republican family. FDR and Truman were not admired. We didn’t think unions were a good idea. The suburban community I lived in during middle and high school strongly reinforced these views. College helped to change my perspectives, but the big reason for my disassociating with the Republican world was morality.

I’d always thought of Republicans as highly moral, a belief strongly influenced by my church-going paternal grandfather. He was a rock-ribbed Republican who believed that business was intrinsically good and that the rights of all Americans to pursue happiness needed to be protected. He strongly supported equal rights for African Americans and looked upon the white Southern Democrats as the epitome of Godlessness.

It’s fortunate, in a way, that my grandfather was dead when the Republicans executed their “southern strategy.” All of a sudden, the Republican Party had a large contingent of people who passionately defended the denial of human rights to all citizens, while also serving as active apologists for slavery and treason. An amazing transformation for the GOP. Lincoln was probably spinning at about 8,000 RPM in his grave. 

The idea that Strom Thurmond could be considered a prominent Republican would have tortured my grandfather horribly if it didn’t kill him on the spot.

I never became a Democrat, in the sense of membership or giving money, but after the 1960s I voted mostly for Democrats. Still, in both Massachusetts and Ohio, I sometimes supported Republicans.

But as the Republican party shifted ever rightward, I became more and more opposed. If you could register to vote as “Anti-Republican” I’d have chosen that over any other affiliation.

All this is relevant because it means that my separation from the news will be less difficult than it might seem. Reading the news was making me angry, and the ascent of Trump will/would have made that worse.

I also don't think reading all that news had much return on investment for me as a retired person. I don't need to impress an employer with my knowledge and, at parties and such, I was developing a bad habit of trying to shove more than the required amount of information into conversations just to show I had it:  "Well, French sources are saying..."

Will I reconnect? Probably at some point. My wife isn’t happy because she thinks it will stifle conversation. I don’t agree:  better to talk about things that don’t make us unhappy and there are plenty of those. Anyway, she knew I was eccentric when she married me.

I’ll continue to read technology and probably culture. Sports is likely completely out, but then I’d been following very little of it for a long time. I’ve no idea who won the World Series in any of the last two decades, couldn’t name a single active baseball player, and don’t even know which franchises have been successful. It’s the ADD thing. I’d rather read old issues of Pravda in Russian than watch a baseball game.

I have lots of printed and electronic novels and histories in the various foreign languages, so I can continue to enjoy those. This kind of reading will certainly be harder work than the news. On the other hand, since I’ll now use real dictionaries, I won’t have Google Translate to laugh at.

There are many things I like to do, including especially writing and photography, that should be positively affected by this change. There’ll finally be time to go back and make all those old photos ready for display.

And there will be other benefits. The house is already cleaner and better organized in just the few days since the election. More of that to come, I'm sure.

The big challenge, of course, will be the rather dramatic shift from being highly informed to being seriously ignorant. It’s a relief that, since I’m also an introvert and don’t socialize much (especially now that I no longer have to do it for work), my encounters with others are limited. Still, the change from one extreme to another could be tough.

And, now that I think about it, reconnecting could be impossible for a modern day Rip Van Winkle. Too much may have happened in a year of to make catching up in a coherent way feasible. We’ll see.

In any case, by not reading anything, I’ll still know as much about what’s happening in the world as the people who watch Fox News.