The power to focus, and to ignore
First published in the Wakefield Daily Item Forum, October 27, 2020.
It’s a week until election day and I don’t know about you, but I’m tired.
I’ve been hearing from friends and family on the phone or on Zoom, by email, and posting on social media, that they are exhausted and ready for this interminable election season to end. Me, too. The psychic cost of facing a constant stream of outrage after outrage from a reality show president, who lacks common decency and who uses this outrage to fire up his base and rile up the opposition, has been high indeed.
It’s important to remember that this is an intentional strategy meant to wear down the other side, pounding opponents into fatigue and disillusionment, and eventual submission. People can only take so much outrage, the thinking goes; then they either give up or simply retreat inward, leaving the field to the Triggerer-in-Chief.
Hang in there, people. Don’t give Trump and his enablers the satisfaction. Our long, long national nightmare will come to an end if we can all stay focused – on revealing and highlighting the stark reality of an incompetent and corrupt president, and on the goal of removing him from office.
How can we do this? How can we focus when the world is so utterly distracting and distressing? The simple answer: be mindful.
Each of us is in control of our own mind. One truly inalienable right that we all have, not only as citizens but as human beings, is the right to think for ourselves. More specifically, we are in charge of conferring our attention where and how we see fit. That may seem obvious, but many people don’t realize that, just as important as this ability to confer our attention is the complementary ability to consciously ignore. We decide what we pay attention to and what we don’t. It is up to us.
This is crucial for keeping one’s sanity. And it’s not just therapeutic; it’s empowering and sustaining. It is part of our fundamental human autonomy as we go about our lives. An author I’ve worked with, Rasmus Hougaard, has shown in his research that mindfulness is the key to mental resilience, especially in times of duress or crisis. In a recent article, he recounted the Buddhist parable of the second arrow, which affirms that while in life we cannot always control what happens to us (the first arrow), we do have a conscious choice in how we respond to what happens to us (the second arrow). Similarly, we are not, or shouldn’t be, slaves to our reflex reactions to stimuli, whether it’s to a vulgar or condescending remark in a conversation, a gratuitously provocative headline on Fox News or CNN, a lawn sign or a bumper sticker.
Or to a post on the Wakefield Community Facebook pages. My friends in town often joke about how these pages are like battle zones, full of snark and fury, with people triggering and reacting nonstop in endless strings of comments, wrangling over the latest development project by the lake, or mask-wearing, or Black Lives Matter and the Wakefield Police Dept. I’ve spent my share of time there (I usually post my letters to the Daily Item on both pages) and, no doubt, there is a lot of ill-informed commentary and trollish behavior that goes on. It often takes the following course: someone writes a post clearly designed to provoke maximum fist-shaking and hysteria; it triggers the desired reflex reaction; people become heated and start name-calling; people get blocked by the moderator; people complain that the moderator is censoring people’s right to express themselves. Repeat the cycle ad nauseam.
If you enjoy this sort of thing, well, I can’t help you. But if you don’t, if it upsets you and exhausts you, the solution is simple: ignore. Ultimately we’re all our own first moderator. People shouldn’t say or do things that are intentionally meant to provoke reaction. When they do, don’t take the bait, just ignore them. Somebody once told me that an insult only works if you decide to be insulted by it. Exactly. Jesus knew this. So did MLK.
Another local example: when everyone’s favorite Daily Item columnist writes a particularly gratuitously provocative and sarcastic column, clearly intended to maximize reaction and get the goat of the more progressive folks in town, ignore it. You have the choice and the power to not give the provocateur the satisfaction of a reaction. (I also recommend taking this tack with President Trump and his ridiculous tweets.)
While this mindful approach is simple, it’s not always easy. It takes some discipline and willpower to resist scratching the itch of reacting reflexively. It also has the potential to do more than just preserve individual sanity and health. If more people did it, it would improve our overall political culture, taking the oxygen of attention away from demagogues like Trump (or Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, et al), who thrive when people are angrily shaking their fists. The demagogue’s worst nightmare is not being disagreed with or proven wrong, but being ignored.
Of course, the power to ignore is value-neutral and applies equally to folks across the political spectrum. Thus, when the more conservative folks in town see another piece by that raging, radical liberal, Jeff Kehoe, they are free to tune out. The last thing I want to do is to trigger anyone.
I recently had a socially distanced conversation about the election in my front yard with an old Wakefield friend of mine. He’s a bit older than I am and we have different political views but we’re both veterans, love our families and our dogs, and Wakefield. It was a good, civil conversation and it ended on a friendly note. This is because we have mutual respect and because what’s most important, and what we do agree on, as highlighted in a recent Joe Biden ad, is that we love this country, “and we go from there.”
Stay focused, my friends: first, on electing a president who wants to unify us, not divide us, who will be president of the whole country, including those who didn’t vote for him. Once we do this, then let’s focus on getting back to normal, where normal means treating each other with common decency, working together to solve real-world problems, healing the country and making progress.
© Jeff Kehoe