Here are three things that helped me in January and might help you in February (2025).
1. Focus on love, not hate.
Spend over 50% of your reading and listening time with the caregivers, the community builders, the humanitarians. This isn’t easy since most news outlets try to send you into a tailspin and then keep you doomscrolling. But switching your focus is a huge boost for your mental health and it helps you become one of the folks you’re focusing on.
Here are some of the people who have lit me up recently:
- The hundreds of folks in East San Jose, including a flotilla of lowrider trucks and a raft of high school kids, who protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids by marching, playing music and chanting “Si se puede” and “ICE out of San Jose.”
- Workers at a Whole Foods in Philly who organized and became the latest sector of the Amazon jungle to unionize.
- A federal employee who got the “quit now” email and posted – “I will not be pushed out by two Billionaire trust fund babies. I’M NOT LEAVING!”
2. Spend time with your communities.
Also great for your mental health and a key to creating a better country – according to the great Cleve Jones (AIDS quilt, etc.) any group of people who care about each other is a bulwark against totalitarianism.
Getting started:
- Make a list of your communities. I was surprised at how long mine got. After the obvious ones like “family,” I realized that my basketball buddies, my doggie pals, and all of you, my newsletter readers, also belong on the list.
- Activate a community or two: Send some ‘wanna get a cuppa?” texts; set up a Zoom family reunion; go to a show and invite a few friends.
- Offer your support to people in your community who might need it right now, anyone from your trans friends and relatives to your neighbor who is hurt and can’t walk her dogs. Caregiving is an antidote to doomscrolling and anathema to the “billionaire trust fund babies.”
3. Elevate you CQ (Citizen Quotient)
I thought my CQ was pretty high after leading a group called Citizen Joy…until I started writing this section and had to look up my mayor’s name (Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft). If you’re like me, raising your CQ won’t take much and it will help you with the first two suggestions on this list.
- Whenever you walk by a school or a park or road construction, say to yourself, “I’m glad I pay taxes.”
- Ask your friends about their interactions with local governing bodies – school board, planning commission, park and rec, etc. Imagine how you might also interact with these government groups, who are essentially your employees, in a positive way.
- Get on the mailing lists of organization who are in the business of creating an engaged civic society like www.centerforcommonground.org and ourpublicservice.org.
