Bracing for the News

Nope, not going there. That almost irresistibly seductive place. Where gratification is found and humanity lost. Where I’m right, you’re wrong, I’m smart, you’re dumb, I’m good, you’re evil.

What makes the current moment so perilous for our society is not just that brutes are breaking so many things—norms, laws, social contracts, standards of human decency. The greater danger is that brutishness is being normalized and ritualized, pulling nobler souls down into the gutter.

I’m a weekly guest on a local radio show. Last week’s topic was the entry in my journal a day earlier about heartache in the heartland and neighbors being there for each other in tough times. I spoke sympathetically of farmers’ plight. One of the program’s co-hosts told of an encounter with a farmer whose spouse had come down with cancer. The farmer feared the cancer was the result of poisoned well water. I chimed in about alarming spikes in cancer cases in Iowa farm country. In Minnesota, a rural county trunk highway…