Living on Edge

I yelled at a text today. Not the content. Not the sender. The actual text.

“Who do you think you are, Text? Why are you bugging me in the middle of this lovely day – demanding my attention, asking for a response? Cut it out!”

And that’s when I knew – I’ve slipped over the edge.

The extremes are getting to me. The irrational, over the edge extremes in nearly all spheres of life are making me nuts. Pronouncements coming out of leaders on the left, on the right – mostly from the extremes, actually – have moved beyond baffling into confounding. And it’s not limited to elected or governmental leadership – it’s nearly everyone with a platform which today includes nearly all 330 million Americans.

In the past few decades, I worked with bright men and women where we discussed the beauty of everyone becoming a news source – that we were moving beyond the days where we in public affairs were at the mercy of whatever the editors at newspaper and TV or radio stations thought was news.

We were in the glory days where we had our own websites, our own platforms, and we could publish whatever we wanted to garner the notice of key constituencies, or influentials, as we call them. All we needed to do was make the news interesting, and we could drive top reporters and editors to follow us and share our content. Great, right?

It felt like a democratizing idea – a true marketplace of ideas. Boy, was I wrong!

Instead, without any sort of filter, no fact-checkers, no review at all, anyone can assert anything to be true and important. And it’s making all of us crazy.

With multiple outlets on innumerable platforms running 24/7, the hunger for content – ANY content – leads to unnecessarily provocative commentary across the spectrum. And the results of this fear-mongering, anger-inciting blather is ridiculous. Old friends are arguing with each other, asserting crazy platitudes about the end of life as we know it if the Republicans are in charge or if the Democrats win.

Well – surprise. Life as we knew it is already gone, and it’s all thanks to an invisible virus that is decidedly non-partisan.

The rapid brushfire spread of the virus is exposing raw and angry fault lines in this country. Some communities have been spared the multiple deaths of family and friends, while others are watching physicians, nurses, and entire health systems nearly collapse under the weight of the sick and dying.

My old epidemiologist friend Mike Osterholm always said it wasn’t a matter of if we’d experience a pandemic, it was always about when. And our public health system wasn’t prepared for the extent of this one.

Frankly, this virus doesn’t really care if we argue about masks, hand washing, or physical distancing. It doesn’t care if we vote for a Democrat or a Republican. It doesn’t care if we prefer the First Amendment rights to our Second Amendment rights – or vice versa.

It’s going to do what viruses do – work to infect 60 to 70% of us before it burns out. As Mike likes to say, we’ve got a raging brush fire of a virus seeking out all the human wood it can find – and yes, he likes to provoke attention. So, for the math challenged among us – that means nearly 200 Million of us Americans will need to be infected or get the vaccine before COVID-19 calms down. With a death rate a little over 1 %, we will experience 2 Million funerals and memorials before this is over.

With that sobering thought, I’m going to work hard to avoid the extremes, the edges of arguments that are being salted throughout media channels and outlets. I know we’re all feeling edgy – so efforts to further promote division is the last thing any of us need.

Stay well – and head to the middle.