Everything Is Broken

When I was a kid, I found comfort in the predictable rhythm of the news programs my mother consumed. In Minneapolis, particularly on bad weather days, WCCO Radio was always on. In the evenings, the 6 and 10 PM broadcasts brought the same anchors and faces, a sense of familiarity into the home. She never missed them. I remember it being calming. First, because it meant I was with my mom and felt safe. Second, because she never seemed upset or worried about any of it, or if she did, she hid it well. Other than the assassinations of JFK and MLK, I don’t remember anything the news actually said. Just her calm face, and the two of us together.Today I have a hard time listening to, reading, or watching any news. So much of it agitates, and confirms whatever view I already hold as morally superior. It thin-slices my rivals. Either tacitly or with purpose, my neighbors become fascists, “libtards,” Nazis. News, newsletters, TikTok videos: civilization is collapsing and must be saved from HIM! HER! IT! Blame Trump. Blame Reagan. Blame Obama. Blame you. RNC, DNC, DSA: all bad, all evil, all good, ruined and ruptured. Dylan wrote, “Ain’t no use jiving, ain’t no use joking, everything is broken.”What if Dylan is right, and everything is broken? Politics. Media. Food. Medicine. Capitalism. The courts. The environment. All broken. By broken, I mean they don’t function or operate in ways that consistently produce the best results. In aggregate, they fail their remit. They come up short.“Seems like every time you stop and turn around, something else just hit the ground.”But what if that’s not all true? What if, as Steven Pinker argues, the world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being? That things are good, and getting better all the time? Based on some pretty convincing research, we overestimate how bad things are, and ignore the evidence that things across almost all areas of human society are good, though far from perfect. But sometimes ugly realities are impossible to negotiate. Sometimes things really, really are as bad as we fear, because we’re in it.Bad to worse was my fate from 2017 to 2022. From the moment I was arrested and taken to jail, I was overcome by dire anxiety, and the news of my potential future was as dark as I could imagine. If a jury decided against me, I would go away for more than a decade. Bad news produces anxiety, which is a hostage-taker from within. It, or rather we, seize almost every resource to amplify the message of doom. During those long nights in jail, whatever healthy, lucid thoughts I might normally have had, abandoned me. Everything was broken. Everything felt helpless.Sitting in a Scott County jail cell with no windows was, in some respects, one of the most deeply illuminating passages of my adult life. There was nothing I could do to change what was happening, at least on the surface. That’s why the slightest expression of kindness toward me was so remarkably loud and obvious. A Scott County guard brought me a message from a former sheriff, who also worked, for fun, at the Festival, and had firsthand information that made what I was accused of impossible. He knew I had been maligned. He asked the guard to treat me kindly, and to let me know that a lot of people on the outside already knew this accusation was wrong.In the moments after the guard left my cell, I felt a little better. After all that had happened in the previous 24 hours, that small gesture just made a huge difference. I decided then that I would return the effort by treating everyone I met from that point forward with generosity and gratitude. Maybe it’s hard to understand. While being accused of an ugly crime and arrested was an appalling injustice, at the same time, nearly everyone I would encounter would give me a chance to practice something important to me, something I’d been quietly working at for years. Radical kindness.I follow a teaching I never talk about, one that rests in a very private corner of myself. It animates the way I think. It’s from one of the oldest religions still practiced today, out of India. It’s Jainism, if you care to look it up. To me it’s less a belief system than a discipline, built around doing the least possible harm, to any living thing, in thought, word, or deed. But it starts within. Internally felt, externally expressed as radical non-violence and kindness. I’ve been vegan, or vegetarian, most of my adult life. I go out of my way not to hurt, harm, or needlessly kill anything, insects included. It sees every living thing as a fellow traveler, to be regarded and respected. I don’t do it well, but it helps me move through the world.What if, I thought, everything was a chance to practice. Instead of seeing the guards as nameless overlords, or meddling public servants in the halls of criminal indifference, I treated them as good, spoke to them as good, acted like they were good. After so