The mean-ing of life

Published March 10, 2025

Yesterday, I thought I might write something short, titled “I’m so tired of mean-spirited people.” Instead, I slept.

Everything’s overwhelming, so I didn’t think I’d post today. And then I saw this poem by Mary Oliver.

OF THE EMPIRE We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Yes, that. Why are we so mean? I am so tired of mean-spirited people.

That’s why I am relieved when I see, relative to transgender people, a cisgender person who refuses to join the pile-on.

You don’t have to get what’s going on with them, to respect them as human beings who are dealing with something you are not.

I don’t get being bipolar or depression, but I would never stand in the way of someone taking measures to alleviate those conditions.

Jesus!! What made us so damned MEAN?!

— Pam Keith (@pamkeithdc.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 5:34 AM

There are common threads that run through almost every newsroom I’ve ever worked in, and one of them is mean-spirited people. I have theories about that, and whether newsrooms attract that kind of person or turn people into that kind of person, or more so.

One of my regrets is that I got too good at trying to fit in that way. Newsrooms can become trenches in us vs. them warfare, sometimes even within the same organization. I hope someone is studying that, assuming newsrooms survive this time one way or another. The culture of meanness is a thing that needs to die.

Decades ago, in my first go at therapy, we talked about jobs and our places in the world. People who want to isolate tend to find employment where they can isolate. I suppose people with inherent meanness find a home where they can let their mean flag fly.

What this means for me now, with so much meanness being directed at me and all transgender people, I can’t say for sure. But newsrooms and news organizations feel increasingly hostile to me. This doesn’t feel sustainable.

It’s just another day of this

Someone posted that poem on social media today, and it prompted me to say all this, but I have to add that piecing together even these few words exhausted me. This country is exhausting me daily, sometimes hourly.

I need y’all to sit with this headline and understand what is being done to our community. They’re trying to criminalize our very existence.

This is a campaign of eradication.

www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/rcna…

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— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) March 10, 2025 at 12:32 PM

How would you feel if they kept fucking with you, again and again, for sport, for fund-raising, for meanness’s sake, slicing a bit of your freedom away here and there, even if they have to make several runs at it? They are hitting us with the clown car and backing up to hit us again.

I have to ease out of this one

Too much “mean” all around today. Too much mean-ing.

So let’s put it another way. I mean …

I have to escape the heaviness somehow. Sending love.

♥

Thank you for reading

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