[Editor’s Note: Kaethe Weingarten, PhD, is the Founder of Witness to Witness, our program at Migrant Clinicians Network to support clinicians. Learn more and access W2W resources on the W2W page. Here, Dr. Weingarten provides her perspective on handling the news cycle.]

When facing a firehose of news, how do I cope? That is the question I have been asking myself these past few weeks, and many people I talk to are also asking themselves this question. I think it is useful to share strategies and so I am going to share the top nine strategies that I am taking right now.
 

1. I have decided that I can only focus on a few topics or areas of focus. For me, I have selected health care and immigration; others may choose to focus on a region, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Ukraine, or the Middle East; or a particular part of the federal government that is undergoing rapid change or uncertainty. When I encounter the news, I can scan or even let pass over me other news that is not directly about the topic I have decided to focus on. 
    
2. I cut off all news, good or bad, at about 6pm.
    
3. I additionally designate news blackout times (whole days like on a Saturday, or specific daytime hours like 9am to noon) during which I shut out, ignore, and don’t learn about any news.
   
   
    
4. I no longer listen to the news while driving. Instead, I’ve started to listen to a playlist I made that has selections of my favorite calming and uplifting music. I am even singing while driving if I am alone!
    
5. I am using kind and firm phrases to let friends and family know I am not continuously open to hearing their distress about the times we are living through. Of course, some of the time, I am open to this and happy to vent with others. But if the conversation falls within my “no news” zone, I will have to gently let people know I have turned on my “off switch.”
    
6. I am decoupling my effort in areas that matter to me – health care and immigration, to name two – with evaluating whether my work is successful. I believe the time horizon for most effort in these arenas is much longer than days, weeks, or even months, and so separating metrics of outcome success from action I take is necessary.
    
7. I am writing out my to-do list each morning -- something I haven’t done in years -- and I am coupling it with a “to-feel” list.  “To feel” is not just a negative, such as “I don’t want to feel overwhelmed. I don’t want to feel distraught.” It’s also a positive list: “I want to feel excited about something new every day.”
    
8. I have looked for new sources of solace in art. For me, I have found a source for a soundtrack to my life. It is from a Rolling Stones article that ranks 100 protest songs and provides links to them.  At MCN we now start our weekly staff meetings with a song and in February, we began with #35 on the list, “Get Up, Stand Up,” written by Bob Marley in 1973 and performed regularly at rallies since then.
    
9. I am on the lookout for useful, uplifting stories. I want to share two.

The first is an anecdote captured on video that poignantly makes the case that kindness matters. Although the outcome of an immigrant court case or a health care intervention may not go the way we intend, how we interact with those we serve can have lasting positive effect. Rachel Dash, a devoted Witness to Witness Associate since 2019, recalls a conversation with a lawyer who had lost an asylum appeal and what the client had told her. I have been encouraged by this anecdote since I first heard Rachel tell it in 2020.

The second story is also one that resonates deeply with me. It is the prologue to John Lewis’ memoir, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998). The story has a powerful message for our moment. I think it’s useful to read the prologue in its entirety to get the full import of what is possible even under dire circumstances. I am providing a summary and a few quotes. I hope you will read the short piece in its entirety.

Lewis tells us from the beginning that “the story has nothing to do with a national stage, or historic figures, or monumental events. It’s a simple story, a true story, about a group of young children, a wood-frame house, and a windstorm.” He was four years old at the time of event he recalls and World War II was in full swing. He lived with his three siblings and most of the people he knew were his relatives in a “little corner of Pike County, Alabama.”

On the day of the story, a Saturday afternoon, fifteen of the children he played with, likely all relatives, were playing in his Aunt Seneva’s yard. “The sky began clouding over, the wind started picking up, lightning flashed far off in the distance, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about playing anymore; I was terrified. I had already seen what lightning could do.... Lightning terrified me, and so did thunder. My mother used to gather us around her whenever we heard thunder and she’d tell us to hush, be still now, because God was doing his work. That was what thunder was, my mother said. It was the sound of God doing his work.”

As we would expect, his aunt herded them all inside her small house, into the living room, which was shaking and swaying with the fierceness of the wind. Then a corner of the room actually started lifting up.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it. That was when Aunt Seneva told us to clasp hands. Line up and hold hands, she said, and we did as we were told. Then she had us walk as a group toward the corner of the room that was rising. From the kitchen to the front of the house we walked, the wind screaming outside, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift.

“And so it went, back and forth, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.

“More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.

“It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams—so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.”

There are many images in the story, but there is one that is staying with me. It inspires me and resonates with me. Wherever we are, with whomever we live and work, we can be like “children holding hands, walking with the wind.” I hope you have hands to hold as you walk with the winds that you are facing now.