Get Closer: A Coping Strategy

…for managing political overwhelm.

rainbow over a burned lot in Lahaina, Maui, captured last week

HI

Shortly after the fires in Los Angeles this January, I saw an unattributed quote circulating on Instagram: Do for one what you wish you could do for many. It was a way of dulling the bludgeon of overwhelm, the panic of catastrophe. A quick internet search reveals a version of the sentiment originated with author and pastor Andy Stanley. Stanley’s perspective went viral for good reason: It was a way of narrowing focus, of making disaster human-sized. A way to transform the seemingly impossible into something manageable yet vital.

In the wake of LA’s fires, as communities on Maui still heal from 2023’s blazes, the current political maelstrom unfolds. I find myself considering Stanley’s approach: Do for one what you wish you could do for many. Overwhelmed by the firehose of information, executive orders, and congressional battles, stoked by the indignation and outrage titrated on a steady drip to all device-having individuals, I ask myself to get closer. To narrow the scope of impact.

To get human about it.

This may sound simple to the point of being ridiculous. Of course we’re talking about human impact. Yet the speed and volume at which we consume all this news—unless it affects us directly—often robs it of its humanity. The truth is, this is not just news. These are people’s lives. Our lives. The weightiness of the administration’s erasures, violations, rollbacks, and economic grenades makes me balk at having conversations centered around ideology. I want to talk about it at the human level, or not at all.

That said, the overwhelm is almost constant. I know many of us who spend time online, or consuming news in any way, feel the same. We want to be informed, but information often comes at a price. And when that toll is our psycho-emotional or physical wellbeing, we risk burnout, disconnect, and desensitization.

So I choose Stanley’s approach. I see if I can get closer. Specific. One person at a time—in my own thinking, in conversation with other (oft-outraged) progressives, and in dialogue with those who hold differing viewpoints. It’s been a helpful method.

The questions are simple: In what ways are you affected by this policy, bill, or piece of legislation? Do you know someone who might be impacted? How?

The answers—from myself and others—are always revealing. Put plainly, policy-making and fear-mongering rooted in ideology, without a basis in human impact, frightens me. And if those who are making and championing said policy don’t have intimate, lived knowledge of its immediate and knock-on effects, the risk passed on to the people it does effect are tremendous. Think: Centuries of men policing and legislating women’s bodies and their socioeconomic and ideological freedoms.

In the unlikely case that I am not personally affected and I don’t know someone whose life might be impacted by one of the plethora of orders and policies in question, I get curious about that distance. Is my life distinctly separate from that from that socioeconomic or cultural reality, that group of people? And does my separation from it dictate how much I care about it?

This is not meant to be an exercise in bemoaning ideological silos. In a country shaped by 9/11, MAGA, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, October 7th, MAHA, and more in just the last quarter century, few of us need reminding that we often live in split-screen realities with our neighbors.

These are questions designed to bring us closer to policy, one human at a time. For me, getting closer means refusing abstraction, generalities, and buttoned up identities. It means considering flesh and blood, complexity, real humans with real needs, overdrawn bank accounts, and kids to feed.

It’s a chosen family member who works in LGBTQ healthcare who can no longer access the CDC’s AIDS research databases because they’ve been deleted from government servers. Another chosen family member who is HIV+. A neighbor with two kids who lost her job in federal cuts to the National Dislocated Workers Program. A friend who teaches at the University of Hawaiʻi, one of sixty universities currently being targeted and threatened with demands of compliance. Another friend’s trans husband who will have to choose between his long-standing career in the military and his identity. The farm-to-school local food-buying program we worked hard to pass here in Hawaiʻi that just got cut nationwide, putting friends’ farms—and kids’ health—at risk. The hiring freeze, loss of staff, and revoked purchasing authority and travel authorizations at Haleakalā National Park, leaving rangers unable to maintain parklands I regularly access. And of course, the swath of terms being discouraged from use (and flagged for review and defunding in National Science Foundation projects), including keywords as basic as “women,” “female,” and “sociocultural”. How dare women or cultural context exist?

Sure, it’s easier to engage with politics on the ideological, keyword level. To dwell in the space of intellectual outrage instead of the lived suffering of people who are being denied their jobs, their dignity, their identity.

It’s also easier to think of groups as monoliths. Those people. Those problems. Those losses. But people, individual humans, you, me, we are not monoliths. We are here on earth for this tiny brief moment, just doing our best to survive the maelstrom. Together. Against all universal odds.

So if I am safe today, if I have a warm place to sleep and food to eat, isn’t it part of the human contract to be curious about the people who don’t have those safeties? To listen a little closer to those who don’t look or live like me?

Under that blood-red lunar eclipse we gawped at three nights ago, we were all just being human. So instead of thinking about the monolith, the group, the ideology, I want to think about how to human, one-to-one, the best that I can.

Two questions I’m carrying into this week, thinking about community care: How can I better understand the ways others are suffering right now? How can we make everyone safer, freer, less afraid, together?

As always, I’ve got some links for you—each destined to defuse overwhelm and facilitate at least a moment of ease.

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

I just started Susan Orlean’s highly-recommended The Library Book, about the historic 1986 fire inside the Los Angeles Central Library—requested from my own local library, naturally. (Sidebar: Have I mentioned my obsession with my library *app*? Do you use yours?)

To listen.

Confession: In moments when I find myself desperate to escape reality, I’ve been binge-listening to Emily Henry rom-coms. I know. I never imagined they’d be so satisfying, but I dare you to give Funny Story a listen.

To watch.

I’m loving Antoni Porowski’s new National Geographic food and ancestry show “No Taste Like Home”: a perfect example of getting closer, it’s taken me on lush culinary adventures to England, South Korea, Germany, and Italy with more to come.

STAY SANE

We need each other, and always will.

Love,

Lily