Changing channels. It’s a television term that can also apply to navigating life. We’ve all had to do this a lot lately — making adjustments, some small, many massive, as we adapt to living during a pandemic.
I’m making another change I need to tell you about.
I shared a lot about my adventures in the wild on social media in the year or so before COVID-19 consumed our lives. As I looked back on it to write this column, a passage from one social media post from August 2019, which I wrote after hiking to Baylor Pass in the Organ Mountains, stood out:
“Climbing the peaks around my homelands this summer and looking across to others I’ve visited has given me a truer sense of time — the planet’s time, not my own. Humanity is writing a dark chapter. The plants, animals and insects are feeling the pain too. These peaks have been watching since before humanity existed. There’s a calming peace in their embrace, looking across at their neighbors.”
That sense of peace I find in nature has sustained me through tumultuous times, both in the year before this global crisis and even now. It’s changed me, in part by helping me find deep and quiet spaces to evaluate what I’m doing with my life.
So before I get any further into this story, the news: I’m shutting down NMPolitics.net. I’m moving on to things other than political journalism, at least for now.
I made this decision just before our governor declared a public health emergency on March 11. I wrote what I thought was a final draft of this column and was preparing to publish it. Then something apocalyptic happened to us all. I’ve spent the last month navigating crisis, preparing our home, working to keep our kids sane, grieving, and, in a handful of moments, re-evaluating.
Ultimately, the circumstances that led me to the decision to shutter NMPolitics.net are even more pronounced today: I’m needed at home and my heart is pulling me in directions other than political journalism with the time I have for writing, photography, and creative and documentary work.
An assertion from journalist Ezra Klein, which I first heard during a recent episode of the podcast On Being, helped me gain clarity and confidence in this change. Klein believes we have built a political system in which it is, at the very least, difficult for people to express the best versions of themselves.
He spoke of a conversation in which former President Barack Obama said we’re all one way in politics, but then around our kids’ sports fields, at PTA meetings or talking to neighbors we’re another way. That the other, non-political versions of ourselves are more core to our being. That this country is ultimately full of good people.
I believe that. I have experienced it in my hometown of Las Cruces. It’s one of the reasons I love the tiny towns of Hillsboro and Kingston so dearly – places where people generally declare a truce on politics because it takes all of them working together to keep their towns alive.
I was at a professional crossroads when I restarted NMPolitics.net in 2015. I had just completed my part in helping start New Mexico In Depth, important work to build investigative and contextual reporting into the core journalism infrastructure in our state. (Right now, NMID is doing amazing reporting on the pandemic, by the way.) I was, frankly, tired. I was starting to not only see the structural flaws in American journalism, but to feel the toll they were taking on me. I wasn’t ready to leave journalism, but I wanted to do it differently. I wanted to help people come together to solve problems, like I’d seen folks in rural Sierra County do successfully.
So I gave NMPolitics.net a new mission: “In these polarized times, NMPolitics.net operates from a belief that the best way forward is together – that we must do the hard work of listening and understanding each other so we can find solutions that work for as many people as possible. We aim to do journalism that fosters conversation and builds community.”
I embraced social media platforms that are commonly used by dark-money interests and foreign governments to spread disinformation and divide us, believing they could also be powerful platforms for conversation, education and community. I exhausted myself moderating debate with a stubborn insistence that people disagree, even vehemently, with respect.
I delved into the world of solutions journalism – reporting that goes beyond exposing corruption and problems to explore how we move forward in a more productive and beneficial way.
At a time when too many news organizations exacerbate the divisiveness, I found a community hungry for an alternative. So many of you donated, contributed to conversations and even helped police discussions when folks lobbed grenades. I didn’t feel like I’d found a real solution. What can one small news organization do to combat the hedge funds killing newspapers and cable news networks salaciously chasing ratings? But the work was still important, and I delved fully into it.
Then a personal emergency forced me to take a break at the height of the Trump presidency. When this administration took office I assumed all the journalism I’d done to date had been preparing me for one of the most important moments in American history. Instead, I found myself consumed by a personal situation that left little emotional or mental energy for work. I had to step back.
I had many moments of despair in those months. So I burned energy at the gym. I started reading science fiction and books about nature again, something I’d not made space for in years. I devoted myself to my family and our situation.
And I retreated into the wilderness to recharge.
I communed with vinegaroons, owls and deer in the desert. I stared down a bull elk after we unintentionally startled its herd, while he stared back and sized up the threat. I discovered a Mexican gray wolf where none is recorded to live. I found fresh bear scat, tracks and scrapes on aspens near a small spring and wild raspberry bushes. I photographed deer fawns and their mamas.
I was knocked down by the boom of a lightning strike that was way too close for comfort as I scrambled to reach a remote cabin during a punishing hailstorm. I observed the retreating edge of a ponderosa pine forest that is stressed in part by climate change. I explored an ecosystem that’s regenerating years after an apocalyptic fire.
I wandered among pictographs and other artifacts from lost times. I climbed peaks and stared across New Mexico at other mountains I’d climbed and the valleys in between. I pondered our history, culture and resiliency.
We were living in incredibly troubling times before COVID-19, times that had only gotten worse since I restarted NMPolitics.net in 2015. But as I stepped away from the political system that encourages the worst of us, a system I’d spent so much mental and emotional energy working within and in many ways against, I found moments of joy and contentedness I didn’t experience when I was neck-deep in the muck. I found perspective I couldn’t see until I stepped out of that space. I heard from our ancestors and the planet and my family and friends. Hope and optimism gradually replaced despair.
When I returned to writing political columns last fall, I was different. It was a time to fight, not just for our democracy, but for humanity. Nativism was sweeping the globe. The systems in the United States that protected us from rule by overlords, including journalism, had been systematically eroded over decades. Our government was never designed to serve all people, but through long struggles we have historically made progress in that direction. Throughout the Trump presidency, we’ve been pulling back from human rights and accelerating the trend toward oligarchical rule.
Powerful changes were in motion. I wasn’t certain we could stop them. As a father, that scared me. I was fighting for my children’s future when I started writing again.
Still, I believe dividing and fighting is a retreat from progress and not how we will win the struggle for justice. Even now I hear common threads in the complaints about what’s wrong with our society from people across race and gender and political affiliation. But the system has increasingly limited our ability to see each others’ humanity. Klein helped me realize that’s in part by design. The system is pulling us apart, aided by a narcissistic president whose success depends on him breaking our nation into pieces.
This reality was starting to wear on me when life forced my hiatus. When I returned to work last fall I discovered an even more divided community. If I wrote fighting words I received lots of positive and negative responses. Columns that sought common ground earned mostly crickets. Many people embraced the shouting, not the conversation.
In short, the conditions under which I restarted NMPolitics.net in 2015 no longer exist. Back then the nation was at a tipping point: There were many people across the political spectrum who were concerned about what was coming and hungry for conversation that would build understanding and move us off this frightening road.
Five years later our shouts are louder and more vulgar. Worst of all, so many of the conservatives I used to have strong relationships with have embraced the MAGA agenda that would destroy everything that makes this nation a place where I’m proud to raise multi-ethnic daughters with a Latina partner who is the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants. This is no longer a country where I can even expect that our girls should feel safe.
America has changed. So have I. That means the container that is NMPolitics.net no longer fits me.
I remain a passionate defender of local journalism. I’m glad there are folks taking up that torch, going to work every day to watchdog government and write other important stories. For now, I won’t be among their ranks.
Instead, I’m spending much of my time supporting my amazing partner Sarah and her work, which includes coaching community organizers in several states and, here at home, helping build a more equitable education system. I’m supporting our girls, who have filled the space in our family that my work vacuum created. Kids need more attention from their parents than our society is structured to give them. In this global crisis, our kids need all the time and energy I have to give.
I find joy and meaning in helping these amazing girls navigate an uncertain world and in supporting Sarah’s efforts to improve it.
My family needs me to be my best self. Spending hours each day in the political muck pulls me away from that.
I am developing new projects. My thinking about them is evolving as I adjust to pandemic life. I’ve found connection in the reactions on social media to the writing and photography I’ve posted about trips into the wilderness. I have some journalistic ideas in mind, and some art, too. I love this paragraph from an article Jessica Kantrowitz wrote in Sojourners:
“There is something about the act of making art — of writing a poem, painting, making music, or crafting a sculpture, that even as it expresses our very specific personality and personhood, brings us out of ourselves and into the universal. And it is just that universal language that is needed right now, when dialogue has broken down in our country to a degree almost equal to the Tower of Babel. Art digs a deeper word out of us, and speaks that word to a deeper place in another’s person’s spirit.”
As I’ve shared my outdoor adventures through photographs and written posts on social media in recent months, I’ve experienced that connection. I’ve seen folks I know are adamantly divided about politics come together to discuss and celebrate the wonders of nature and life.
Like Klein, I believe America is full of good folks. I’m not going to give up the search for common ground, but I will be working in different spaces. I’ll be reflecting in a deeply personal – and perhaps universal – way that I hope will resonate and spark something important.
I want to thank you all for your support of NMPolitics.net, which I plan to keep online for archives. So many of you have continued monthly donations. I really appreciate your patience with my journey. I’ll be cancelling all your monthly payments this month. I can’t continue taking your money now that I’m clear about heading in a different direction.
Please stay connected with me. I’m sharing much of my photography and writing on Facebook and Instagram @haussamen and will share news about future endeavors. If you’re interested, I still sometimes rant about politics in the echo chamber that is Twitter @haussamen.