I’m done with “push” content from newspapers, substacks, pods and podcasters, bloggers, social media platforms, conspiracy boosters, angry MAGAs, fundraisers, revolutionists, ah-has and ma-ha’s, political shamans, alarmists, talking heads, Chicken Littles, grim reapers, Beltway pundits, scribblers, cartoonists, and diatribe specialists.

Or as another noted crank once put it, I’ve had it up to here with “Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism, This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m.”

All I am saying is don’t give push a chance. 

Push is a big smelly stinky pile of cacophony that is smothering your consciousness.

I have too much push in my life. It is like a starship tractor beam pulling me into a social media hellscape.

I can’t take the crescendoing caterwaul from the professionally aggrieved class anymore.

I get it. Mark Twain once said,  “A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.” If he were here today, he would either broaden the charge to include social media or quip, “Bejezzus, what was I thinking!”

That’s what I’m saying: What was I thinking?

I’m over the angry pitch-after-pitch-after-pitch. ”Holy-hell-he-really-said-this!  Send $5 now to fight the existential threat to us all.”

They are not wrong.

Our leaders are shit. The country is going to shit. It is going to get shittier before it gets better. If it ever does. And that $5 would really help, but there are so many hands reaching for it. Who gets it? The most outraged? The angriest? The most glib? The one with the best smackdowns? The funny one? The ex-insider? The most aggrieved? The most bereaved? The most ill-conceived? The one who seeks no reprieve?

Who am I to believe? 

When Trump “won” the election, I enlisted the insights of them all. I needed somebody to make sense of it. I needed the tools to fight evil. I needed the language to counter the lies.

It worked all too well.

It has become almost impossible to take my eyes off the computer screen.

And that is the whole point: Nobody wants me to take my eyes off the computer screen. Fifty intelligent, clever, whipsmart pundits, professors, protagonists, proselytizers, provocateurs, and prevaricators rush to post a variation on the same horror of the moment. Each is more cleverly insightful than the last. The erudition is running amok. I need a dictionary to find out which way the winds of revolution and dissolution are blowing.

And they are not wrong.

We don’t have a president. We have a mobster wielding tariffs like a two-bit shakedown artist. Hoods pummeling a candy store owner for protection money show more class. He’s followed around by a soulless tribe of death-eaters, each willing to commit a greater atrocity than the next to earn a shallow nod from Orange Voldemort.

I know all this. I’ve known it since before he came down the golden escalator as the savior of the failing christo-fascist universe. Everyone did.

I had the same holy-hell moment when he was allegedly re-elected as every other decent human being, which, contrary to appearances, is probably a great majority of the U.S. population. 

I desperately clung to my New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, New Republic, Robert Reich, MeidasTouch, Lawrence O’Donnell, Politicology, Ezra Klein, Chris Hayes, Bryan Taylor Cohen, Heather Cox Richardson, X, @, Bluesky, Tribal, and Instagram like the flotsam of my broken dreams. I pulled in more and more of the floating detritus, jetsam, and lagan of social media until it felt like a life raft on which I could survive the coming storm.

Then I subscribed to Semafor, NextDraft, BBC, Pocket, Contrarian, Dial, Paul Krugman, The Conversation, NPR, CNN’s 5 Things, NOTUS, 1440, Mark Jacob, Timothy Snyder, Associated Press, Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The Status Kuo, Snopes, Ann Telnaes, London Review of Books, Vox Populi, Semafor Media … there were plenty more.

Bring it on! I screamed. Hitting “subscribe” buttons like it was whack-a-mole. Send me your best and brightest! Send me your insights! I be like, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

I was Laarus (Emma) seeking the news and information to counter the putrid stench rising from Washington D.C.

And they did their job. Everything I asked of them. And more. Way, way more.

Most of them are gone now, or whipped back into cages so that they can’t push two and three and four critical messages to me every day, alerting me to the latest outrages in Trumplandia.

In my world, “push” is all but dead.

It took getting sick to realize how sick I was becoming.

A week ago, I was flat on my back, sleeping, not eating, aching. My chest was in a vise. My stomach was in knots. My head was in a dark, soupy fog. My stupor was in a torpor. 

For two days, I barely moved. For two days, I did not pick up my iPhone or open my Chromebook once.

And I had an epiphany: Holy, Hell, this feels good.

Not my body but some inexact part of me that I have given over to the loud and angry and righteous voices of social media that I had allowed to push their way into my consciousness. Hell, I had invited them in.

As I lay there, I realized how little I have been writing, how little I have been reading, how little I have been practicing the mindfulness that I’ve cultivated for decades. 

I have been in full red alert, reaction mode. 

Today, it feels like I am waking from a coma with a wicked hangover, and the scores of survivors crowded around me are no longer screaming and yelling and demanding that I pay attention to their outrages.

Today, I am deciding when I will consume the news, how I will consume it, and what I will do with it. 

My head is clearer. My body feels lighter – OK, I took the enforced fast to heart and have drastically cut the food portions, and I’ve essentially stopped drinking. (That may have to do with my doctor telling me to drop about 25 pounds – NOW!)

I’m also on Facebook much less and will be even more so next week when I turn over my community page, “San Antonio SMA Friends & Neighbors,” to a smart new admin. It has been an act of love, but a time-consuming and distracting one.

I need that time back. I need it for six grandsons whom I’ve been ignoring for too long while in this social media stupor. I need it for my sons and their wives, too. And my own beautiful wife, Rose Alcantara.

How much of me they will want, we shall see.

I’m not turning my back on the outrages and the outrageous place my country of birth has become. You don’t need to be omniscient or up on the latest to know how horrible he is and they are.

I’m just picking my fights. The outrage is in my control.

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The image accompanying this column was generated by an Artificial Intelligence program, based on the content. How did it do?

Hypocrisy alert! As I publish this blog post, it occurs to me that it is going to be pushed out to thousands of people who have subscribed to it — the very thing that I am railing against.

Have you no shame, Robert?

No. No, I guess I do not.

But I love you all for sticking with me. I promise better, if not more, in the future! (And hit “like” if the spirit moves you. It just lets me know you are out there!)