Does the escalation from anger to madness in this country have anything to do with our physical isolation from one another over the last year?

The question came to my mind as I read a remembrance of James Harvey, a cultural historian who focused on American movies. He wrote specifically about his love for American movie theaters—”the feeling in the place” when you’re watching a movie with random other Americans, and yet you experience the story together in a shared spirit that Harvey called, “the common American knowingness.”

What is that thing? It’s not political agreement. It’s a deeper agreement than that, about basic human reality. It’s important for making relationships work. And maybe it’s essential to holding a country like ours together.

Lot of people think air-conditioning made America less familiar, bringing neighbors in from our summer porches. Arthur Miller wrote about Central Park in New York, before air-conditioning. People slept outside on fire escapes, or in Central Park, where Miller remembered tip-toeing “among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake.”

Common American knowingness, common American space.

I think that was what a pal of mine was referring to recently when he agreed we should not argue politics while we can’t see each other. He wrote: “Any intelligent debate on the subject of America in today’s light, between you and I, could only be done over a pool table and many beers :)”

Not that either of us looks forward to that session at all or that the beer will do much good. (I’m thinking of a boozy argument with another friend that was so fierce his false teeth kept falling out onto the bar.) But that the spacial proximity around the pool table will make us real to one another once again, and harder, since we still have great love in our hearts, for the other to dismiss. In a room together we will not be mere debate opponents to be scored against, but living, breathing people, accountable to parallel lifetimes of accumulated common knowingness—common American knowingness.

My high-school daughter and her classmates have long suspected that their beloved choir teacher is a Trump guy. Now, Trump people are a rare species in these parts, and as scary to Chicago kids as Sasquatch. So this notion always troubled them, but the man was so charming and funny and loving (and musical) a presence in their daily lives that it never came to a head. (I’ve seen this teacher make a joke during a choir concert; the kids laugh in harmony.) But during this year of remote learning—complete with George Floyd and the election—steam began to build, until one Zoom period last week, when a student demanded that the teacher talk about what had happened at the Capitol. He refused: “This is my class.” One or more students said something to the principal. The teacher read a statement yesterday, tearfully. “I love every one of you,” he concluded. Afterward, my daughter was in tears, too.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I know, Honey,” I said.

John Kennedy said sixty years ago, “Let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

Whatever else we need to do to hold this country together—and our families and our friendships and our schools and our workplaces—we’ve got to make it safe to start sharing that air again, before it’s too late.

I’ve run this little meditation a few times in this space over the years.

I keep coming back to it—and when I do, I’m compelled to bring you back to it, too.

I think it’s especially poignant in times of real social change—and especially valuable to people in midlife, people with mortgages and jobs and raggedy families and a growing sense of finite remaining years of life who wonder all the time (and usually in secret) if they are being as useful as they can.

And I think it’s especially useful now, as we each break for a rest after a hard and disorienting year—and to ready ourselves for what will inevitably be one more.

It’s by my first publisher Larry Ragan, one of the most influential stylists I ever read. In a little Catholic newsletter sometime in the 1960s, Larry wrote:

There are the insiders and the outsiders. Two kinds of people. Two ways of looking at life. Two ways of making things happen.

The outsiders raise hell. they demonstrate; they organize marches. They issue reports that excoriate the establishment, challenge the status quo, appeal to all who thirst for justice.

The insiders? Often dull. The insiders speak a different language: they know the tax tables, the zoning variations, the assessment equalizers, the square-foot cost to educate the kids. You’ll find them on the school board, city government, on the village board. Ordinarily not word people, they have mastered the art of the platitude.

Outsiders are often wild. At first, they don’t seem to make sense. The first black kids who sat at a lunch counter and refused to move were outsiders. The first marchers to Selma were outsiders. Surely it was an outsider who first proposed the shocking idea that the generic “he” is a sexist word. Dorothy Kay, who in the 1950s stopped Manhattan traffic to protest atom bomb tests, was an outsider.

Please God, let us always have outsiders and give me the grace, in my better moments, to know how to be one. But I’m torn because I want to be an insider too. The insiders resist the first answer that comes to them: they have heard it before. They are offended when they see the world’s complexities reduced to slogans shouted into a microphone or preached at a town hall meeting. They are saddened when they hear someone argue that God is on his or her side, and they wonder why God doesn’t speak so clearly to them.

Sometimes you’ve got to feel sorry for the insiders. When they win, few know of their victory. When they go wrong, their mistakes are branded as evil. Often they share the goals of the outsider but continue to say, “things aren’t that simple.”

The world is filled with people who like to feel they are right. Insiders are not always certain they are right. They are unhappy when they must resist the simplicities of popular sloganeering. So when we tip our hats to outsiders, as so often we must, let’s not do so with such vigor that we fail to give two cheers to the insider.

It’s this line that seems even more relevant than when it was written: “Please God, let us always have outsiders and give me the grace, in my better moments, to know how to be one. But I’m torn because I want to be an insider too.”

I live in a world where a Black gay woman ran for mayor of Chicago a few years ago and I was getting notices from some friends to my left not to vote for her because she was using her creds—as a Black gay woman, in Chicago—to conceal her brutal establishment agenda. In that scenario, when I supported Lori Lightfoot, was it as a progressive or a conservative, an agent of change or a defender of the status quo—an insider or an outsider? (In any case—these days, those folks are saying, “I told you so.”)

Everyone feels like an outsider this year—especially Trump voters. And everyone behaves like an outsider—throwing words like rocks. No one wants to take responsibility for being an insider; no one wants to take that rap. And yet many of us are insiders in one or more important aspects of our lives—people working within powerful institutions or industries, always deciding how far to push it, and how fast. And often wondering where to begin, and what to say. No wonder why the speechwriters I look at on these Zoom calls these days look back with eyes that are tired from more than overwork.

Last week I thought to send Larry’s prayer to one of these tortured insiders and outsiders—a close friend, who seems to me under the most terrible pressure, as a chief communicator at an educational institution beset by young agitators for urgent change—change that he and the leader of the institution believe in, but don’t know how to implement overnight. The communicator sent Larry’s prayer to his boss. She called it “beautiful.” And the communicator told me, “It’s utterly perfect for where she and I are right now.”

Where so many of us are right now.

Insiders, and outsiders.

In America.