More than two decades ago, I was the author of a very silly weekly column for The York Dispatch/Sunday News in Pennsylvania called “The Flick Chick.” It was mostly just me being snarky about movies, but it was cute and occasionally accidentally profound. It was not the most earth-shattering thing I’ve ever written, but it made me and a lot of readers laugh. That’s important.

Then the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, happened, and suddenly my and other stories about fun and frivolity were replaced with calming poems and photos of birds. We probably could have used a laugh or a distraction, but it seemed almost disrespectful to the dead to make light of anything when there was so much darkness.

I kind of feel like that right now.

Just last week, the federal government shut down and the president of this country told the military that people living in cities were the enemy and should be used as practice for foreign wars. This happened. He said it. When I woke up the next morning, I thought, “I have no idea what funny, pithy thing to write about next because I can’t stop thinking that my government is coming to get me. And my child.”

Then again, it’s my job to figure it out, to find the humanity in our lives, whether humorous or horrific. This piece is more meta than I usually get, but I’m writing about not knowing what to write about at this time, because, man, is it ever awful.

It’s like a moral writer’s block. At the very least, I refuse to sink to the depths of the Richard Gere writer character in the Maryland-set “Runaway Bride,” so desperate for a column subject on deadline that he wrote a defamatory piece about a stranger based on her jilted ex’s whining in a bar. I promise to never be that stuck.

I have done a few recent columns about how experiencing dumb and inconsequential fare such as “The Golden Bachelor” is helping me survive not only having to hear the headlines about our current constitutional crisis but having to write about it myself. It’s becoming increasingly hard to know how to be funny when it’s all falling apart. I can do profound, but funny is my favorite. I’m at a loss here.

It’s gonna take a lot of hot people tripping over their backpacks on “The Amazing Race” to make me forget reality. But I have to try to parse it. I’ve created a niche for ruminating over fairly serious things and trying to create a dialogue with myself and my community to tell the truth of a thing.

Make no mistake — the truth is scary, unprecedented and dangerous. I have had to explain to my kid how his daily walk to school and his sports schedule might be affected if tanks come to our neighborhood. I know this is not unheard of in other parts of the world, but I never thought I’d have to parse that here. I also know I am not the only parent having that conversation with their babies. That’s why I have to talk about those things with you. We need each other.

Then again, I cannot live exclusively in this fear, as a parent or as a writer, because it will literally suffocate me. It will extinguish my joy, which I think is what those who hate us want. Nah. They can’t have it.

In the weeks after 9/11, I wrote Jan Tuckwood, the features guru at a Florida paper that I’d met the year before at a conference in New York. She’d spent her career finding thoughtful and creative ways to serve readers. “I am struggling to know when it’s OK to be funny again,” I wrote.

Her answer was gentle and galvanizing. She basically said, “You are smart and compassionate enough to know when people need funny. And they will. They will appreciate it.” A year later she’d hired me to work for her at the Palm Beach Post in Florida, and I kind of think she trusted me there because she trusted that I always wanted to do right by my readers.

And now that’s you.

So here’s my solution. I am never going to ignore the tragedies happening in the world and in our backyard. But I am always going to find ways to infuse that with a basis of hope, of light, of the things that make you want not to give up. I will not be like those killjoys on the internet who are mad at anyone who laughs at anything or scolded Selena Gomez for daring to get married last weekend because what about the struggle?

The struggle isn’t going anywhere. But we must be fortified in joy, in laughs, even the weary and ironic ones. We must jealously guard any happy we can because it will fuel us when we need to be angry. So I will keep being silly in this space, between the angry and the sad, because we need it.

You need me to be. And I’m all about it.