coping

…you have to wall off the stupid. You have to reduce it to the least possible background roar. You have to let your mind slip off of it to something else, make sure you don’t have a chance to focus on it.  That’s where the books come in handy. Or some really engaging television. That’s why pulling the plug on Twitter is crucial, and having pared down the RSS to just what you need to be informed without tipping the balance into wallowing in the misery.

You have to try not to think about how you left Alabama because you didn’t want to live in a place that venerated stupid, that made its decisions based on what stupid people thought was smart, that thought you were the problem because you “didn’t have any common sense,” as if failure to adopt everyone else’s inculcated prejudices was a shortcoming or as if you should have learned all the cues and clues of a social system that ejected you as soon as you could read in complete sentences ahead of time. You left all that. It wasn’t supposed to follow you. It certainly wasn’t meant to gain executive power over the country…

-21 March 2017

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