This day was not an easy day to be off social media.

As reporting of the assassination attempt on Former President Trump came in, I was tempted to hop on Twitter and see what was on my feed.

Instead, I watched the news. Knowing things were happening in real time, I did compromise my declutter and also read journalists' posts I have added to a "Reliable Media Sources" Twitter list. A few posts offered some insights that weren't on mainstream media.

Today, I avoided the news almost altogether.

What I wanted was not more information as much as different perspectives on the situation. Less emotion and more reason.

So while checking my email, I found a few newsletters from respected scholars on the situation.

Timothy Snyder, a historian and author of On Tyranny, provided a helpful perspective on the source of political violence. Looking back over European history in the 1920s and 1930s, he points to several examples in which violence of this nature often occurs within a political party.

Likewise, George Lakoff, linguist and co-author of Metaphors We Live By, asks if this event will reign in Trump's rhetoric or enflame it even further. (My bet is on the latter, unfortunately.)

What these engagements with media have in common is they are slow. Snyder and Lakoff took their time in putting together their positions, based on a lifetime of study along with an understanding that the earliest take is too often wrong.

Lakoff even offers an operating procedure for dealing with breaking news in a more deliberate and present manner. (Source: onthemedia.org)

As the caption on the top notes, "cut out and tape near your computer or TV".

I would add: limit how much you watch and consume online.

Not that this always has to come back to literacy leadership, but I don't see these ways of thinking and being in the world often taught in schools. This is critical literacy and media literacy to be intentional about what information we allow to enter our minds, how it is conveyed, and how quickly it comes at us.