As we enter the height of the political season, I feel compelled to read every single blog under the sun. I feel the whole range of emotions as I read through blogs that pump up my candidate and show good news for him, just as I do blogs that tear him down or show bad news. It is much like the emotions I feel when I watch my favorite sports teams play. Yes, politics is more important because the country’s future is at stake. But my PERSONAL future is unlikely to be affected dramatically based on the outcome of this (or just about any) election. In 1860 the country’s future was literally on the line. Today? Not by a long shot. And funny enough, voters in the 1860 Presidential election followed their traditional partisan habits more faithfully than they did the politics of secession. Yes, even in the nation’s greatest crisis the hard core of partisanship prevailed over the electorate.
Politics, for the most part, is about abstractions and I get wound up about abstractions. When it gets real – usually at the local level – I get less wound up and more pragmatic. After all, I go through my daily routine dealing with obstacles in a fairly practical manner. If I have a student who’s missing class, I deal with that. If I have a pile of papers to grade and I don’t want to get to it, I find some way to procrastinate and then go about the grading. If I have an obnoxious student in class, I do my best to defuse the situation. Unless the problem becomes truly threatening – and it very rarely does – I don’t get that worked up about it.
I love my job teaching history at a small liberal arts college. I can introduce students to the past in ways they’ve never thought about before. To see students “get” the Second Great Awakening or the Market Revolution of the early 19th century, or the complicated questions surrounding Reconstruction, or struggles of immigration and urbanization in late 19th century America is a real joy.
But I find myself spending more and more time obsessing about politics. While I’ve followed politics closely since 1988, when I was 15 years old, I’ve never sunk more of my mental energy into it than I do now in the blogosphere.
Sometimes I feel I’m contributing something insightful here at The Moderate Voice or at some other blog. Sometimes I’m just venting and letting the emotions of the exchange get the better of me. But rarely do these interactions bear significantly on my real life. Still, I get genuinely depressed when things look bad, and positively giddy when polls look up. Why?
Like every other election year, this one is filled with stupid non-stories, pseudo-outrages, false character attacks, and pointless media swarms. How much of our attention is captured in these fights? (As a historian I’ve read about similarly irrelevant exchanges in the 1840 election, so the politics of irrelevance is nothing new. They were no more “serious” or “issue-oriented” back then than today). How much of MY energy is sucked into these fights? Does obsessively reading every blog about the latest “scandal” really make a bit of a difference? I can donate some money here and there and I can add my opinion and try to sway a few people, but I really don’t have much of an impact. It seems, ironically, that my obsession over politics is inversely proportional to politics’ real consequences in my life. And my addiction to the blogs only feeds the frenzy inside my brain.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably felt this too at some point. When does it ever end? Will my brain ever accept that it’s ended – even if my candidate has won? Can’t I just be apathetic for once like all those happily ignorant folk out there? Why do I care so much – when there’s so little I can do and the consequences are so small for my actual life?
I’m a blog addict. And I bet a good portion of the people reading this are too. I make all sorts of crazy assumptions about people who post here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, even though I don’t know who these people are. For all I know, my great blogging nemesis is my wonderful neighbor next door. And that does not comfort me one bit.
So what to do about it? The only answer is a self-imposed limit on blogging. Spend maybe 15 minutes in the day and 15 minutes in the evening on the news and blogs. I can get caught up on what the big story is in that amount of time, even if I don’t have the chance to read every rant, concern troll, or cut-and-paste job in the wider blogosphere. Yes, here at The Moderate Voice comments are much more civil and informative than many other places. But still, it’s so easy to get sucked in.
Do you feel this way? Do you find yourself literally getting lost in the abstract world of political blogs and wonder where the hell your day went? Do you find yourself unable to pay attention to things that really do matter in life because you’ve got some really nasty commenter and blog posting gnawing around in your head?
If not, you’re lucky. I envy those who can turn this world on and then turn it off. For those of us with more obsessive personalities, the political season is like a black hole. What’s the remedy? I’m all ears.