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It’s No Use Watching the News
A Cold Warrior’s survival skills for the 21st century
My grandmother was an impassioned person with strong political views (surprise!). She subscribed to news magazines, she religiously watched the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, she clipped articles from newsletters and newspapers about current events or current political debates and pushed them like drugs on family members, trying to make one brother or another, one daughter-in-law or another, see the light — seeing the light being to see the world as she herself saw it.
I was a little surprised, then, and a bit confused, the first time I witnessed what struck me as rather odd behavior on her part: turning off the TV news if she found it upsetting. I probably didn’t notice this habit of hers until I was in high school or maybe even college — so, the 1980s, when there was a lot going on at home and abroad but you had to watch the evening news or read the morning paper to know about it. And my grandmother, who prided herself on being informed, would see something that upset her or angered her, and she would just get up and turn off the news.
I asked her why.
“Well,” she’d say, “it’s just too upsetting.”
Now I know that was something of a dodge. She was plenty upset about all kinds of things happening in America…
