I’ve been in touch lately with a longtime correspondent, who has promoted my new book Soccer Dad, but who told me on the phone the other day that she was hoping to collaborate with me around the theme of my last book, An Effort to Understand.
That book is subtitled, “Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked in Half.” My friend wanted to create some way for us all to talk to one another. Or to stop talking, and just act more empathically, somehow.
I admired her instinct.
And yet, all the blood drained out of my veins, all the air went out of the room, all the booze drained out of all the bottles of the future.
I didn’t believe An Effort to Understand was going to inspire an American understanding. But I didn’t anticipate it was going to be embarrassed by an exacerbation of national miscommunication.
Fuck it.
Over the last several years, it’s come to seem true to me that unless you’re an important public voice in politics, the best thing you can do is the best thing you can do: which is the most loving thing you personally know how to do, that’s uniquely and thus powerfully you. And that seldom looks like a civility campaign.
To my correspondent, I made the obvious point that I’d rather spend my time these days communicating with other parents about how to raise our American children, than arguing with abstract Trump voters about the cancer-riddled body politic. I told her that fervent personal expressions of love seem more effective in this moment than political expressions of protest (much as I respect a lot of those, too).
And I started thinking of some other examples I’ve seen lately. They popped into my mind quickly and easily:
My heretofore orderly and childless colleague, who with her husband has fostered and then adopted three very young children in her late 40s, and swims in the chaos of that every day simply because she knows it’s infinitely better than the madness those girls would be swimming in without her.
A young trans pal who has by force of commerce and personality overridden the prejudices of an old, hardbitten local Polish bar owner by drawing a paying crowd of LBGTQ people as guest bartender, one night a week. I’d write more about this, but this scene probably best kept under the radar these days, everyone agrees.
My Sunday morning baseball buddies, who welcome an increasingly wide variety of comers (including my niece, occasionally) with enthusiastic, good-humored, grateful love, just like the country we all grew up thinking this was, or would be. America’s pastime, indeed.
And so on and on and on.
I was seven when the bicentennial came along, in 1976. The assassination of King and Kennedy was only eight years past. Watergate was two years behind us. Vietnam was one year over. Yet at the bicentennial, America seemed perfect to me, brimming with stories of George Washington, and the cherry tree and not yet even tarnished by an awareness of slavery.
I’m 57, and the hairy old, scary old 250-year-old America can still seem pretty good, with a chance to get better—depending on where I look, what I’m looking for and whose eyes I’m looking with.
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