"Sometimes the Noise Gets Too Much"
Heather Cox Richardson, my favorite historian, is also the perfect therapist for our times
On or about June 16, 2015,* I began to suffer from a complaint you might be able to recognize. I use the word “complaint” in an old-fashioned sense, as for a malady. The symptoms in this case are a vague sense of threat, an uneasy idea of the truth, heartache for the suffering of strangers. Some days you could cry at any moment.
But this unrelenting sense of world disorder also motivates me to work every day to help rouse votes for Democrats in November.
Sometimes it’s hard to cope with the weight of it, given that the cause of it is still very much present, still hammering away at civilization. The January 6th Committee is my grounding. Surely, justice will prevail.
A couple of years after June, 2015, Sam was running for North Carolina House, so we were out in the district, campaigning. At a fundraiser in a Hendersonville restaurant, someone who later became a friend said to me, “We’re all excited about Heather Cox Richardson. Have you heard of her?” I had to write this name down so I’d remember it. “Her Letters from an American are a daily diary of the history we’re all living through,” she said. “I never miss her posts.”
Ever since that day we’ve read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter, not only to see how yesterday’s events fit into American history, but to learn exactly how America has been in this crisis before and how we survived as a democratic nation.
Beyond that, Richardson often mentions news that we missed. I imagine that she has an army of grad students, sifting all night through news sources, with the electronic equivalent of yellow highlighters.
Later on I discovered Richardson’s hour-long Facebook videos, “Politics Chats” on Tuesdays and “History Chats” on Thursdays.
Her viewers’ morale is very much on her mind. She’s all about real people. That’s what makes her history lessons so appealing. You can relate to the prominent actors she’s talking about, but you also feel for the acted upon, who are ordinary citizens like us.
She’s the perfect therapist for our times.
On July 5 of this year she said,
I know everyone’s tired, stressed and frightened and now is the time not to splinter and think, ‘Oh, I have worry about this, I have worry about that,’ but just to say, ‘What do I want. Not what does Ted Cruz want, but what do I want.’
And how do I get that? How do I make my voice heard? Stop trying to react to what other people are saying, and start to act on what you want and what your friends want, and how you want to reclaim this country. Because it has worked pretty well until the last 40 years. Not for everyone, I know, and it was not perfect. But that’s the whole point. We always get to work on it.
But we don’t have to live in the world that the modern-day Republican Party has consigned to us. I don’t want to live in their [idea of the] world. I want to change it into something better than it’s ever been.
On May 31 of this year, the January 6th Commission was getting ready to broadcast the first public hearing. I remember feeling suspended at that time, holding my breath. Would the hearings be enough to stop the bad actors who were still barreling toward upending the 2020 election and the Biden presidency?
I think I was like a great many other Americans, since Richardson picked up on this anxiety. She said in her video on that day,
It is my feeling that people are so overwhelmed on every front. Covid is running rampant again, we’ve got mass shootings everywhere, we’ve got people threatening civil war. There’s so much going on all the time.
But at the center is that Americans generally believe in fairness. And we’re decent people across the board.
Sometimes when the noise gets to be too much, it’s not a bad idea to let the noise go and remember some of our basic principles that are really easy, like fairness, equality before the law, the right to vote. These things are solid. They’re important.
At the end of the day they’re going to be worth marching for and using our voices to defend.
She reminds me that I’m not alone in my feeling of apprehension.
Heather Cox Richardson is a historian not just of events, but of people. She has described in other videos what we can do as citizens to help turn things around in our nation. Her recommendations come from knowledge, observation and her belief in the strength of democracy.
I will share what I’ve learned from her about actions that we ordinary Americans can take to protect democracy, in a future Postcard.
*On June 16, 2015, Trump rode the golden escalator down to the basement (how fitting!) to announce his running for U.S. President, and described the crowd as “thousands”. Actually, he had paid the couple dozen people there $50 each to act the part of a much larger crowd.
Great piece! Thank you.
I have fallen in love with HCR and Iso appreciate her brilliant and astute Letters. Her weekend photos of Buddy's bring a sense of calm and reflection that we all need. With HCR and Deda's careful and intelligent presence I find the resolve to go forward in our pursuit of defending democracy.