Where are you, right now, on your end-of-the-world bingo board?

Has anything happened that really pushed you over the edge?

Maybe it was the whole Murder Hornet thing.

How about the large asteroid that is scheduled to pass somewhat close to earth?

I’ll admit that the anti-racism rioters defacing the Abraham Lincoln statue in London was a body blow.

But that wasn’t as bad as the retired African-American police officer being killed while defending a store from looters. I’m not sure that had anything to do with #BlackLivesMatter.

Maybe I’m forgetting something? Oh, right, the coronavirus. How about Donald Trump, pepper spray, rubber bullets and that strange Bible drill? Talk about efforts to cancel “Paw Patrol”? And no baseball (right, Bobby Ross, Jr.?). All that and a large chunk of the New York Times newsroom doing its best to kick off a red-state vs. blue-state journalism war. Basically, the advocacy press doctrines of Kellerism (click here for origin of this GetReligion term) are now being applied by Times people to a wider array of news topics.

It all kinds of adds up, especially for old journalists like me. So I am heading to the hills. Actually, I already live in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains outside of Knoxville, Tenn., but my family is going to make one of its regular escapes deep into the mountains of North Carolina.

Forget WiFi. We’re talking about a blue-collar valley where cell signals are so weak that the wind pretty much needs to be blowing from the right direction to send a text message. But, as I have said before, the rocking chairs work fine and so does the gravel road next to the river. And barbecue.

GetReligion will stay open, sort of. This week’s podcast will go up tomorrow. There will be a think piece of two over the weekend and I’ll come back down to “normality” early next week. And if you want to read a fine mood piece on the journalism side of this craziness, let me point readers back to this Clemente Lisi piece: “Journalism cancels its moral voice: What does this mean for Catholic news? For religion news?”

Lisi — as a New Yorker’s New Yorker — basically opened a vein and said what he needed to say. He told me, via email, that he started this piece over and over and finally wrote something he could live with.

So here is a crucial chunk of that. Let us attend: