I was wide awake long before the alarm went off at 5.30am to ensure that I got to Mass on time and the darkness outside accurately reflected my mental state.
The first thing I did was swipe my phone and head to the toilet, and there in the quiet, as I read the news of the looting, stone-throwing and burning, I felt a pain rise up in my gut, so bad that I immediately thought of my brother-in-law who died of a heart attack at 32, after suffering similar symptoms.
Automatically, I forced myself to breathe deeply, and continued to read and the pain kept getting worse. It was then I realized that what I really wanted to do was keen because I was suffering the deepest grief, over lost dreams and hopes for a beautiful country now mired in hatred, bigotry, arrogance and lust for power.
I am still in grief and now I feel it will never leave, at least in my lifetime. I am in grief over the violence and the loss of hope. I am in grief over the kind of leaders we have empowered and for our failure in removing them.
I mourn the debasement of our democracy and sense of fair play and the tolerance that was once a hallmark of this country. And when I think of the esteem in which my own fraternity was once held, I want to cry about the way we have squandered opportunities to enrich these perceptions. Plus there are the dire stories of journalists being attacked, threatened, beaten, even shot.
But on Wednesday morning, I was feeling so sick and poorly that I thought perhaps the time has come for me to get right off social media and its hundreds of stories, almost all negative. Perhaps that would make me feel better, take away the pain I felt throughout my body.
Immediately, however, I thought of how disempowered I would feel with no access to information in stories told by journalists. How would I know what was going on? How would I know how to read the signs of what was happening around me? How would I, in the end, protect myself through decisions correctly made, based on information, accurately shared?
For that is the whole point of journalism, isn’t it? To empower people with information, simply communicated, duly verified and vetted for the truth, or at least the truth as we have figured it out. And like it or not, never has journalism in its purest avatar, shorn of the frills of appeal to those seeking entertainment, been as important as it is in these times. This is true right across the world.
After all, when I keyed “journalism is important, now more than ever”, into my browser and hit the search button, I got 7.85 million results in five seconds. There’s comfort in knowing other people are searching for and writing about the same thing.
Last year, I began my column for the week of Ash Wednesday by quoting from the first few lines of T S Elliot’s eponymous poem. This time, it is the last few lines:
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee
More than ever, we need to sit still even among the rocks of the terrifying calamities that are visiting us, learning to care and not to care. And then stand up and walk forward to our chosen horizon in the hope that good will prevail in the end.
