Not letting the news ruin our lives

Sam Smith - I majored in anthropology back in the 1950s and also became news director of Harvard's student run radio station, WHRB. Thanks in no small part to my academic major, my approach towards journalism did not depend on only the most prominent individuals and institutions but also included ways in which the habits, gatherings, actions and views of ordinary citizens, too often ignored by major media, were newsworthy as well. 

I learned back then that civilization was not the sole property of the famous and the powerful but also included the thoughts and habits of plain people.  

In the 1960s I started a paper on Washington's Capitol Hill, the neighborhood next to a great white building that provided its name. During the 1968 riots following Martin Luther King's death, one of the hardest hit areas was right near this headquarter of Congress. In other words, some of the most powerful in the world worked near some of the weakest. 

Things have changed a lot since then but the gap between the strong and the weak has grown, thanks in no small part to the rise of television and the Internet, both of which have added power to the powerful and lessened our involvement, for example, in our communities and neighbors. 

Our obsession with Trump and his ability to abuse it is thanks, in part, to the common lengthy use of TV and computers.  Even someone like me, bothered by all this, still types away and goes after Trump because it seems the best use of my time. 

Yet I also moved to a small town in Maine nearly two decades ago because Washington seemed working less and less well. And that's helped a lot. My Maine town shows that a real America is still alive. 

Further,  I think much more about real people than those I can only watch on a screen. I feel like I live in two worlds -one I only see and one I actually live with. 

Lately, another personal experience has revived itself in my mind: the more than four decades that I played in bands. And it was not my solos that recovered these thoughts. On the contrary, it was that most of the time, as I played the piano, I was backing up someone else. The fact that, in a band, one's dominant time is spent helping others is seldom discussed yet is what really makes a tune sound good. Even if you are called a star much of the time you're a helper. 

Another thing about playing music is that it is a metaphor for another way in which life really works, namely that you do your thing and then move on to something else. I have come to the conclusion that life is like playing a gigs or acting on stage.  You play your part, then you go home and in a short time you have a new one coming up. 

There are millions of us who are wiser or kinder or more sensible than those running our country.  But we can't let our world be defined by television or the Internet. We need to get back to building an America we can love and be proud of. And we must treat other real Americans as our leaders.