These are the times that try men’s souls.

— Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776

The other day, Sally Quinn, writing in The Washington Post, where she made her name, first as the premier, sharp-penned reporter for the paper’s Style Section and then as the wife of legendary executive editor Ben Bradlee, bemoaned the current state of affairs and told of her personal crisis upon the second election of Donald J. Trump.  She got “severely depressed,” took an antidepressant, and called her old shrink, who was also depressed.

She went through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptable. Ultimately, her response to this spiritual malaise — and seemingly her advice to others similarly afflicted — was to meditate.

Now, meditation is something I happen to know a little bit about.  Back in the tumultuous mid-70s, I wrote a four-part series for The Washington Post on transcendental meditation, or more globally “the TM Empire,” reflecting the movement’s broad geographical reach and financial depth. The organization claimed 30,000 newcomers each month. In fact, the Post paid $125 for me to take the  10-hour course and receive a mantra, a meaningless word I would repeat silently during two 20-minute meditations daily. This, I was told, would declutter my mind and bring enlightenment and peace. I wrote:

“TM is sweeping across an America traumatized by a decade of turbulent protest, a disastrous war and the fall of a president.” I went on to explain, “TM had been introduced in the United States in 1959 by a diminutive Indian monk named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and had attracted attention in the mid-1960s when such celebrities as the Beatles, Beach Boys and actress Mia Farrow went to India to learn the technique from the Maharishi.”  Only much later would  I learn that the blissed out monk had tried to grope Mia, prompting her to flee his ashram but not entirely to abandon the practice.

“Of course I meditate,” she told me recently. “But I’m trying to think of what we must do to save our country.”

Back in the 1960s, Maharishi’s mantra was competing with another proferred by psychedelic guru Timothy Leary: Turn on, tune in, drop out. Either by meditation or medication, the times seemed to call for a timeout from the stresses of engaging with the ills of society.  Hopefully, the Maharishi and his movement claimed, if only 1 percent of the world meditated, the age of enlightenment would dawn and everything would be peaceful and copacetic.

A newsletter given to TM newbies asserted, “The full possibility of TM in terms of rejuvenating society will only be realized when the individual meditators participate more actively in stimulating the growth of the movement….”

My TM reporting took me from a townhouse at 2127 Leroy Place NW north of Dupont Circle where I obtained my mantra, to its modest “national headquarters” in Los Angeles, to a former Borscht Belt Catskill Mountains hotel, to a “Forest Academy” in northern California, to Fairfield, Iowa, the home of Maharishi International University, founded in 1971 and still in business as “the home of Consciousness-Based Education.” The benefits of  meditation without all the Hindu mysticism was early confirmed by Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, whose book The Relaxation Response  provided empirical evidence that the practice produced measurable medical benefits.

That was good enough for me to take to meditation minus the Maharishi and his cult-like movement. I had a friend who did TM but also referred to some its practitioners as “bliss-ninnies,”  becalmed to the point of obsession with the practice, to the exclusion of all else.  At the extreme, TM advocates even claimed that one could physically “levitate” while meditating, a dubious claim even for many true believers, of which I never came close to being one.

But still, for a time, I sat silently, eyes closed, for 20 minutes twice each day. This did in fact have a calming effect and undoubtedly lowered my blood pressure.  But then an external crisis intruded on my TM-inspired bliss.  It was Oct. 1, 1975 when the pressmen’s union at the Post went out on strike, not peacefully but violently, setting presses on fire and assaulting a pressroom foreman.  I was volunteering at my son’s nursey school when it happened.  But I soon learned that the Newspaper Guild, of which I was a member, was calling a meeting that afternoon to deal with the crisis.

I no longer wanted to be calm, to be “blissed out.” I wanted, I needed to become engaged, and like a smoker quitting cold turkey, I stopped meditating.

It was a tortuous situation that would bitterly divide my union and ultimately result in a decision by publisher Katharine Graham to break the pressmen’s union and, with “replacement” workers, continue to produce the newspaper while pickets and protestors marched outside the building.

The details of “the troubles” and my role are painful to recall. There were  three unit votes. The first, taken the afternoon the strike began, was, given the violent start of the strike, overwhelmingly to keep working, even if it meant crossing a picket line. I sided with the majority. Then I decided, in spite of threats from  our own local union, that the unit should support the strike, and I voted accordingly. The third vote, after “Kay” Graham gave the pressmen a deadline or face loss of their jobs, was the closest but with the same result.  I felt bound to comply with the unit majority, despite my minority view.

So I continued to work during the strike, even while I became part of a pressmen’s strike support committee from inside the building. Our local filed charges against us and hundreds of Post guild members resigned. A company union challenged guild representation. The guild won a pyrrhic victory, and somehow I ascended to the position of Washington Post Guild Unit Chair, working to resurrect our almost irreparably crippled union.  We went three and a half years without a contract, finally settling for what amounted to a near capitulation. The Post guild never fully recovered.

Meditation alone would not solve our problems, then or now.

“I’m not very successful meditating, but I consistently try,” Mia said. “I haven’t achieved transcendence into pure bliss. Others have. It may be the answer for us personally, but it will not change anything beyond our own minds.”

Sally Quinn was happy she’d stuck with it, however. “I find that I’m not as agitated by things that used to upset me,” she wrote. Then Trump chose Kimberly Guilfoyle, former FOX News personality and Donald Trump, Jr.’s ex-girlfriend, to be ambassador to Greece.  “I had a total relapse.  It was back to denial to me.”

But denial accomplishes nothing, as we have painfully learned.

I found myself thinking about Ben Bradlee and asking myself: What would Ben do?  To me, the answer was obvious.  Ben would fight like hell.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi 1918-2008