I recently spent an afternoon doing some garden maintenance. The summer blooms were spent and needed cutting back, part of the yard had gone patchy and bald and I hoped to seed it before the weather turned cool, and I had some bulbs to plant and mulch. But before I could plant my future tulip bed, I had to take care of the weeds.

These insidious invaders had long gone unchecked. At first, they hadn't seemed like a problem – a few scattered sprouts here and there that I managed to ignore. Then they bloomed, and really, they didn't look that bad, filling out the bare spots around my more actively curated beds. They grew rapidly, gangly and tall, depriving the plants I was trying to cultivate from water and light. Their stems had grown thick and thorny, and their roots had gone so deep I could no longer extract them without real effort.

So on one of those rare, absolutely perfect late-September Chicago weekends, I cut, seeded and finally dug up piles of undesirable vegetation. Working up a sweat felt rewarding after several weeks of the sickening roller coaster ride we call 2020.

A previous week started with a frantic text from an old friend. A mutual acquaintance went on a racist and anti-Democrat rant on Facebook. While their families had been friends for decades, the original author saw no issue in repeating these hateful memes even when she called out his hypocrisy. This actually came as no surprise – I’d blocked this guy before - but the fact that he was so cruel to my friend and her family was shocking and disappointing.

I saw comments from others I recognized in support of this ugliness, and that, too, was unsettling.

Then Trump refused to disavow White Supremacy in his surly and churlish exchange with Joe Biden in their late September ‘debate.’ People I know and respect posted their disgust, especially in light of the President’s dog whistles to the far right, and many supporters came out of the woodwork to justify the Republican's record, which, they said, explained the tactics. The frustrating spiral of boorish rhetoric sucked me down, and the debate itself literally gave me nightmares of dysfunctional relationships past. I found myself unable to focus, almost unable to function.

After another nearly-sleepless night, I’d had enough.

I got online and blocked, unfriended, unfollowed, unsubscribed. I took breaks from those I found emotionally exhausting without guilt. I donated what I could to a select few charities working to win the country back from this plague of darkness and weak moral character.

Finally, almost anticlimactically, I removed Facebook from my phone. Even though I know it’s for the best, this was a hard move. I had once enjoyed seeing friends and family and humor and news, but there was little joy to be found as of late.

The weeds of hate choked out the light. It was time to get digging.

The first day away was tough, the second less so, and by day three, I felt almost human again. I let myself log in briefly from my computer to follow up on a few events managed through the platform. Even though my guard was up, I still found myself drawn into the comments of a seemingly innocuous thread, and I hastily closed the Facebook tab.

Since 2016 we have seen the signs. The misogynistic chants and T-shirts. The support of anti-Semitic wolves who marched as sheep in collared shirts. Lies and deception on an international scale. Support for bullies and murderers who besmirch the names of law-abiding civil servants everywhere. When we raised our hands to report these micro-aggressions, these posts by trolls and bots, these coverups and injustices, the ruling powers turned us away en masse, unwilling to act and possibly pick a side, possibly lose political favor, possibly lose face, possibly lose ad revenue.

That’s the thing about hate.

It starts off innocently enough, the tiniest sapling. You think you can ignore it, so you do. It doesn’t seem so dangerous, really. Maybe it’s not your problem. Someone else will take care of it. Then suddenly, there’s no light. And there’s no sign of what grew there before. The roots now run deep. It will take some sweat to claim back our garden.

I carried a final load of now-exterminated weeds and wiped the sweat from my forehead with a grimy arm. On my way to the garbage, a speck of green caught my eye. A small, thin leaf punctuated the pristine bed of brown bark - a tiny plant, barely visible.

I brushed the mulch away and uncovered a thin stalk with two pale leaves. I pinched it by the base near the soil and plucked it out, roots and all. I tossed it on the pile and went on my way.

One less weed to dig up in the future.

This essay originally appeared in the October 2020 issue of Fete Lifestyle Magazine.