Disengaging digitally not about spurning community

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/01/2025 (267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I get it. I really do. It’s been a bruising few years in the conjoined lands of politics and social media, and I understand the urge to hang it all up and retreat into the background. I feel that urge myself.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been on vacation in Newfoundland, beyond the easy reach of news. AM radio, yes, complete with the clicks and whistles of old-time atmospheric interference, but no television, no Wi-Fi and only limited connection to cellphone data.

Things went ahead and happened in the world I heard nothing about, and, despite being in the news business for decades, I found I didn’t miss them. And my life didn’t seem to functionally change by their absence.

Instead, there were 12-foot-long spruce logs to be junked and split for next year’s wood-stove fuel, a closet door to move to a new location and then trim out, a wall to cut for the doorway.

There was damage from a fast-moving windstorm to clean up — the remaining huge post-storm waves coming ashore for days after a weather warning about coastal flooding and six- to eight-metre swells — and trails above the beach to reconnoitre. Pale-green mounds of reindeer moss to touch, just to feel once again its odd flexible resistance, unlike almost any other plant.

Watching the moon step through its cycle on nights when the clouds let it.

It’s a siren song that’s hard to resist.

Friends came over for dinner, and wanted to talk provincial politics: Newfoundland and Labrador is in the midst of deciding on a new power deal with Quebec. It’s one that would attempt, in a limited way, to redress the great errors of the Churchill Falls deal, which saw Quebec buy power from a huge Labrador generating station for pennies and then resell it at huge profits, reaping billions for years. They wanted to talk about Donald Trump and tariffs and the (at that time) potential departure of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. About what’s next for the federal NDP.

As a former political columnist in the Atlantic provinces, that kind of discussion used to be my bread and butter. I used to be able to spend hours interested and involved in discussing the possible, both big and small. But that night, I found I didn’t have the energy — or interest — to take part.

I wanted to talk about the die-off of plenty of big east coast spruces, one that had been explained to me by a government official in the environment department as a curious form of drought — not centred on how much rain had fallen, but how it had fallen, in intense, quickly-running-off rainfalls followed by periods of dryness the shallow fans of spruce roots weren’t good at dealing with. An additional stress was the last thing the spruces could handle.

About how our guests’ business was faring, about the fact tall hay in the brook valley had yet to be knocked down flat by winter. About a straight line of deep moose tracks through the green mat of sphagnum moss across the back of the property.

About almost anything other than politics and public policy.

It’s a debate I have with myself often now: with the political sphere having become so bitter, nasty and divided, it always feels like someone is picking a fight. And I don’t have the energy for that kind of petty hand-to-hand.

And then I wonder if taking myself away from it is just taking the easy way out.

I don’t doubt this is a crucial time, one where many of us will have to gird ourselves for when the bullies take office to serve themselves. Canadians and Americans may both come to realize that when governments talk about wholesale cuts, those cuts impact both communities and individuals. And that those individuals might well be the very people calling for and voting for cuts in the first place, never expecting the cutback chickens to come home to roost.

The common good now takes a back seat to the personal good: paying taxes so we can all benefit has been replaced by a need for tax cuts “because I’m not using those services and shouldn’t have to pay for them.” It’s become all about the me, and not about the we. And we go further down that road every day.

I also don’t doubt giving up is a dangerous option.

I know many people are tired. I know some feel like surrendering the ground and stepping away.

There are small things still to be done.

To be kinder, every day. To be a good citizen of the community, because humans joined communities to be safer, healthier and stronger through their unity. To step away from taking part in the social media process that now seems to reward and celebrate gratuitous public cruelty more than anything else.

Our place in the world is not going to fix itself. Intellectually, I know hiding from it won’t help.

But … hiding sings a song of small and personal peace.

A little louder, it seems, every day.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca