The husband and I have decided to unplug from the news for a month. No CNN in the morning, no drive-time NPR. No perusing news blogs in an effort to stay informed, keep up, or remain in the know. No more Tivo’ed Daily Show during dinner, or Colbert after dinner is cleaned up.
The news is, frankly, depressing. And its making us cynical.

It started with, innocently enough, the alarm clock. The 7am radio alarm would come on, and Carl Kasell’s reassuring voice would tally the number of dead and wounded in Baghdad that day. Of course by now we’ve all become somewhat numbed to the daily body count, so its easy not to really “hear” the thing, but it has a subtle (or not so subtle) effect if that’s the first thing you hear in the day.

Then I decided that I couldn’t listen to the news on the way into work, so we switched to Sirius “First Wave” (oldies for Gen-Xers), and reserved the drive-time news for the evening commute home (we drive together most days). I just find that, given the preponderance of really bad news these days, it makes me anxious and angry and frustrated to listen to so many really bad things that, frankly, I can do little or nothing about.

The proverbial last straw was last week’s assertion by Tricky-Dick Cheney that the Vice President doesn’t work for the Executive Branch. While laughable, it illustrates an administration that has zero regard for the intelligence of the public, holds utter contempt for the fundamental principles of the Republic, and is obsessed only with its own power and reactionary agenda. Our usual news venues were either as dumbfounded as anyone else, or had the obvious satirical responses. But boy, the knot of impotent and cynical anger that put in my stomach hasn’t left for days.

So we’ve had enough, at least for July.

Of course I feel guilty. I feel like its my duty to stay informed, so I can write my congressman, senator, governor, state rep, county commissioner, mayor, and zoning commissioner to voice my rage at whatever idiocy is being perpetrated on our country, state, and community this month. And its hard to get away from this stuff. Sit down to eat a bowl of cereal in the morning, and the remote, almost by itself, turns on CNN. It turns off just as easily though.

The world will do just fine without us for a month. Maybe we’ll do even better without it.