Our Uniquely American Inability to Truly Connect
Any American who's had the chance to live overseas will tell you that when compared to the friendships typical of most other cultures, American bonds are wanting. When it comes to forging meaningful nourishing relationships we are quite possibly the worst. James Baldwin wrote about this a little bit when living in Paris he came to understand that much of the emptiness and mistrust of others he had always assumed to be uniquely characteristic of the Black experience was in fact a fundamental truth sewn into the whole cloth of American life.
Morgan Jenness, the literary agent who most defied all the usual stereotypes of the business, tells a moving story from her early days when she was working in the literary department at the Public Theatre. During a particularly stressful and disheartening period she heard that Mother Teresa was scheduled to make a visit to New York and suddenly felt compelled to speak with the her in hopes of resolving what was feeling more and more like a moral crisis of faith around her chosen career path.
On a whim she found herself traveling uptown sixty blocks to wait on the sidewalk in front of the Indian Consulate hoping that the odds were good that the spiritual leader's itinerary would bring her there at least once. And, as would prove true for Jenness again and again and again over the years, on that day, her intuition served her well as she looked up and came face to face with the tiny woman she knew she needed to consult.
In a flurry, she heard herself describing a lack of meaning she'd been struggling with that gnawed at her because she deeply wanted to make a life of meaningful work and was starting to doubt whether theatre could possibly compete with selling everything and traveling to India to be of service however she could. Just feeding one human being at a time, no matter what the sacrifice.
Mother Teresa (herself a brilliant creative thinker) had an unexpected response.
"Our people suffer under a famine of the body. Your people endure a famine of the sprit. Your work here is essential."
And the rest, as they say, is history.
What if the pandemic turned out to be a catalyst for America's long overdue reckoning?
The pandemic has revealed itself to be a powerful force for change. Most Americans have had some form of an awakening regarding at least one aspect of the construction of life pre-CoVid. In many instances, in my humble opinion, we have acted in haste and with destructive consequences, particularly in the area of human relationships. See my piece on Medium, Why Pandemic Ghosting Could Haunt Us for Years.
My play, A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored addresses American alienation in this most strange and disorienting period I like to call Pandemic Pause. For 55-min. our audiences are immersed in a sea of half-truths, sly omissions and bald-faced lies and asked in the end to take what they've heard and make a judgment. It's a frustrating task for sure but no less confounding than life lived online in this strange new world.
Brené Brown Directs Us to Cultivate a Deeper Curiosity
Brené Brown has a wonderful video that begins to address one of the root causes of that deep and silent emptiness. In it, she explains that true human connection cannot occur without true self-examination. In other words, unless and until we Americans get a little bit better and more comfortable with seeing ourselves clearly and honestly, our relationships will always feel hollow because they will be built on a foundation of lies. Lies we tell ourselves to avoid feeling anything close to the shame we might were we to seriously examine our history and our culture. Lies we tell ourselves about the moral compromises our system seems to demand of us without so much as a whisper.
If Social Media proves itself to be the most powerfully destructive force to be unleashed since the atomic bomb, we still might manage the hat trick of using its destruction as a catalyst for a kind of change that sticks and reverberates throughout every corner of the social fabric.
Of course that won't happen until we learn to be honest with ourselves and one another, even when it feels awkward and inconvenient.
If you're curious to see A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored, there's one more chance. On Wednesday August 31st I will perform the piece live to a small audience on Zoom. Grab your ticket today by clicking here.
