I used to teach a unit on “media literacy” when I had high school sophomores. We looked at how advertising impacts consumers, the varied uses of propaganda, and the growth of social media. It was as much wanting as information. Media is not designed to be fair.

For years, I also forbade juniors from writing on abortion once I had read twenty or thirty hysterical essays. Some issues seem to provoke a sort of blindness that makes a balanced understanding of the problem impossible. For years, essays on China’s one-child policy were entirely one-sided. The girl who wrote her senior paper defending pit-bulls as a breed, cried every time she tried to revise.

Ursula K. Le Guin warned about avoiding hot-button issues. The issues that make us hysterical are rarely good subjects for rational discussion.

Cigarettes smoking was a hot button issue for me. My father and father-in-law both died of lung cancer after smoking Camels for decades. Several neighbors died at around that time, also of lung cancer. Though I was the one in my family who managed practicalities such as the sale of my father’s car, the disposition of his body after death, I could barely stand to think of the disease itself. I got over this emotional response eventually, but the spring after Daddy died I witnessed my emphysemic neighbor stopped at a light, his pick-up cab filled with smoke. I nearly rammed his Ford with my little Honda. He would also die of lung cancer in the following year.

Just as personal experience triggered my emotional response to a friend’s smoking, so too does media. The news about cigarettes killing us is true, but for centuries we believed the media image of smoking as a glamorous adult activity. The truth is that only children and the childish take up the habit these days. Anyone with common sense recognize it is a stinking, unhealthy, and expensive habit they cannot afford.

My future daughter-in-law was afraid for me to know she smoked, and out of respect for her we pretended not to know. I would have liked to celebrate with her when she finally quit, but there, officially she had never begun.

Someplace between what we know to be true and wish to be true, someplace between hating the person and their habit, between what we are warned might happen and common sense about what is possible . . .

Another popular topic I forbade was “media as monster.” These essays invariably turned into rants about imagined conspiracies. And here we are today, with the Russians actually involved in a massive conspiracy to divide our nation. It seems they have been successful in creating only irrational anger where there might be common ground. Instead, I taught students about propaganda, a topic they find far less interesting than whatever narrative they are reading on social media.

Perhaps it is time for me to accept that media is a monster. What can I do about that?

The sweet.