How careless: What I didn't do on my summer vacation
I turned off almost everything, including the news. I then became optimistic about things
Click.
Without internet access or a screen bigger than a flip phone, I spent two blissful weeks by the sea in Nova Scotia.
Apart from occasionally checking emails when in town for supplies, I was freed from digital commercial information.
As a consequence I missed further and continuing grisly details of the American catastrophe (I could have guessed there would be another mass shooting), I missed more of the interminable winding-up of the United Kingdom by its ruling class, missed the half-arsed cheap shots of the warm-up to the coming least-worst federal election.
For the first time in ages I wasn't reading about the hubris and blame shifting attending the Muskrat Falls fiasco.
I missed the media help Mad Max Bernier audition for the role as Canada's own Nightmare Clown of the Right and so help him seduce the creep vote.
No one pitched me for products based on search history
My thoughts as betrayed by my online viewing habits went unharvested and untraded. I wasn't assailed by ads for bathroom faucets and stovetop espresso makers because a search engine knew I was in the market.
Instead I swam daily, ate a lot of fresh fruit and veg, drank a few G&Ts and read.
You forget how you used to read before the internet, social media and streaming services gobbled up your available eye-hours.
Two weeks and I consumed three very good and one disappointing novels, an excellent book about the Weimer Republic, and a wad of magazines that had accumulated on the floor beneath the mail slot while I had been away on business.
A couple of reviews I read prompted me to order the books reviewed. Reading begets reading.
Swimming in the ocean, and not being jazzed continually by the screen's blue glow, I slept soundly through the nights. Untroubled by the meditation on the doom that is the news, I became more optimistic.
Life was clearly better without the net. I contemplated unplugging when I returned home. It would make me healthier and happier.
Now, on the other hand …
Then one evening I met an American, a professional and a Trump supporter. He believed that everyone in America was afforded an equal opportunity, that the "mainstream media" advocated for the political left, that the Clintons were Bond villains. He believed he paid too much tax.
The poor were poor not because of their circumstances but because they were malingerers. The New York Times was the Daily Worker with a Style section. The Canadian health-care system was a disaster with worse outcomes than the American system, more costly and widely despised by this country's citizens.
One of the pieces of news I missed while holidaying was the death of billionaire libertarian David Koch. For decades, Koch funded causes that advanced the sorts of messages that Trump supporters had heard and taken to heart.
Koch helped create a new force in American media, one that has quite effectively convinced many working people south of the border that they share Koch's interests in massive tax cuts, deregulation and smaller government.
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I flew home just after Labour Day, a holiday that has now nearly lost its meaning because of decades of inept, underfunded communications by organized labour in North America. That part of the culture war fought for control of the media has an obvious victor.
So, in the end, unplugging, turning away from the news media is surrendering to the people who can hold out long enough to poison most of the wells.
In the end, however unpleasant, we all have to tune in
It's not that one should watch and read the news, it is that one must.
That means not merely the sources that have been tailored to echo your own beliefs, but those which you oppose. And it is not enough to take it all in passively, one has an obligation to be critical.
I recommend the restorative power of the two weeks away from it all, from the electro-hectoring and algorithm-driven messaging, from the Trump tweets and the noise of the grievance machines, but in the end, however unpleasant, we all have to tune in.
I would plop sloppily into the 20-degree waters of Mahone Bay from a raft off the end of a wharf.
The day I left the raft was decoupled and put on a mooring in advance of an approaching hurricane.
Someone heard of its coming on the news.
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