People watching

One of my biggest mental challenges these days is finding a way to manage the stress from the endless stream of soul-crushing headlines in the news. It feels wrong to avoid the information all together; even if I can’t do much personally to prevent DOGE’s child minions from stealing our data and destroying our federal government or stop ICE’s masked soldiers from kidnapping people from their homes and workplaces, I can at least bear witness and oppose those things when the opportunity arises. At the same time, tuning in too closely to the daily drumbeat of chaos—irrational tariffs are on so the stock market/economy is tanking, irrational tariffs are off so the stock market/economy is rising—makes it impossible to read or sleep or do much other than endlessly doomscroll in search of some kernel of hope.

My solution lately?

People watching.

Not the kind of people watching you see on social media, where the super buff demean other folks at the gym or snarky fashionistas mock the lesser sartorial choices of average people walking by. Not the kind of people watching you might wrongly assume happens all the time in New York City, so-called “normal” people gawking at “weirdos” with full body piercings and face tattoos. No, I like to look for those small moments of peace and grace, where ordinary people are just going about their ordinary activities and living their everyday lives.

The solo man racing home from the subway, large bouquet of flowers in hand to celebrate a special moment with the special someone in their life.

The overburdened mother pushing a baby in a stroller, toddler on one side, dog on the other, all of them exhausted from too much time at the playground.

The teenaged girls giggling at something on their phones, the teenaged boys elbowing one another off the sidewalk as they celebrate their release from another long day at school.

On Memorial Day, my son and I ate at the local pancake house in the Jersey shore town that our extended family has been visiting for decades. As annoying as the trope has become, there’s a reason journalists tend to visit the town diner when trying to obtain information—that’s where everyone goes. The elderly couples whose children have moved away, the parents of young children whose babies have kept them up all night, the college students meeting to compare notes on their big Saturday nights and now-painful sunburns. Friends and family gathering over a simple, relatively inexpensive meal—it was people-watching heaven and a wonderful respite from weeks of particularly horrifying news. (Deliberate murder of a young couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum! Near misses at Newark airport! Never-ending war in Ukraine! Boat crashing into the Brooklyn Bridge!)

I recognize, of course, that these flashes of normalcy are the privilege of the fortunate, reserved for people who (at least from outward appearances) have not yet been personally devastated by the harms unleashed by the current Administration. They’re not the well-intentioned experts in their fields or FBI agents who dedicated their entire careers to the public good only to be forced into retirement or fired without cause. They’re not the children dying of measles because their parents believed falsehoods about vaccines promoted by certain of our current “health” leaders. They’re not the hardworking, law-abiding, unfairly demonized immigrants who came to this country seeking a better life and are now under constant threat of arrest even if properly documented, sometimes even if they’re actual citizens. They’re not the journalists or lawyers or judges or—you fill in the blank—who have become the latest targets of violent threats after being publicly declared an enemy of the President.

But even if they aren’t included in the daily news cycle, those ordinary moments in the lives of “normal Americans” deserve our attention too. Because, after all, aren’t those moments what we’re fighting to preserve and protect?

So, while continuing to advocate and protest and donate as much as possible to support a return to a government I can once again be proud of, I will also continue to do what I can to preserve my own sanity. And for now, that means watching the people around me and reminding myself exactly what we’re fighting for.