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“Truth is, I hit a wall. Gutted by the death toll. Disturbed by the government’s shortcomings. Dismayed by political rhetoric that bears no resemblance to reality. Worried about friends who are losing their jobs and kids who are missing school and senior citizens who are living in fear. I crawled in bed and cried for our pre-pandemic lives. I think those tears had been waiting a month to escape.
I wanted to share this with you because it feels freeing to do so. Now is not a time for faux-invincibility. Journalists are living this and hating this just like everyone else.”
The messages helped me see that there are so many people, all around the world, feeling the same grief and frustration. Vulnerability is a good thing — and relatable. Many were quick to say that their lives are relatively easy compared with the health care workers on the front lines and the laid-off workers in unemployment lines. I feel the same way. Still, the pandemic is taking a toll. Here are what some people said via Twitter and email:
Arthea: “As a mental health professional, I know no one is immune to the trauma we’re experiencing in our ever-changed lives. I’m a proponent of ‘scheduled meltdowns’ where I put on music or a movie that I know will release a floodgate of tears. Those tears are just under the surface these days but when your profession requires you to keep it together, you sometimes have to find a time to let it all release. Your hitting the wall is understandable, deserved and frankly quite healthy.”
Michele: “Yesterday was tough. I don’t verbalize much at home because my kids are already disturbed enough by these changes. I’m now having dreams and nightmares that I haven’t experienced since I went through cancer treatments. I feel the same kind of fear now…”
Palmer: “I finally hit a wall last night, too, as I was reading some news accounts in the evening to my wife… How are we going to get out of this and back to some kind of ‘normal’ life if the testing isn’t done? And that’s just one of so many things that are being mishandled. It’s just so incredibly frustrating.”
Jeff: “Just remember this, buried under all the nasty rhetoric and the politics, are the folks out there who are just struggling to get through their days, decent people trying to do the right thing. There are more of us than there are the other guys.”
Let’s show solidarity
All of the tweets and emails made me more confident about what I wrote in Saturday morning’s newsletter, about the importance of showing solidarity with people who are suffering for all sorts of reasons.
The sheer scope of the unfolding tragedy is mind-boggling. “Over the past 24 hours, we’ve lost 4,591 Americans,” Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti said Friday night. “That’s more in a single day than we lost in the entire Iraq War.”
“When people grow fatigued in the face of observing widespread suffering, they tend to 1) become distressed, 2) blame the victim, and 3) go numb and turn away,” Varma wrote. She recommended “an ethic of solidarity” be infused in news coverage — to humanize nameless, faceless data and individual anecdotes.
“Shifting away from purely individualized struggles, an ethic of solidarity would mean standing with communities affected by not only representing their pain, but also their views on what happened, what their needs are, and amplifying their ideas on how these needs can be served,” Varma wrote.
What do they want to know? And what do they expect from our elected officials?
