Maybe you’ve seen this clip on Facebook. A woman drags a dinner table into her apartment building hall. The doors start opening. People of all backgrounds cart out their meals and some chairs, and they happily share time with each other.
The idea of getting people together, changing strangers into friends, is not new. However, in this video, the protagonist is a mother functioning as a social commentator. Everywhere she looks, people are staring down at their phones. Even in the close physical proximity of her residence’s elevator, albeit often one of the least socially acceptable places in which to strike up a conversation, this continues. She opens the door to her own home, and again, her teenager is locked in cyber-land, head phones on, eyes glued to a screen. As the old saying goes, “What’s a mother to do?”
We people of a certain age have this conversation a lot. On the one hand, we are overloaded with stimulation, and indeed participate in tuning out with social media. Yet on the other hand, we know how much looser and convivial things felt when talking over the fence, or in the grocery line, was not such an anomaly.
I attended a lecture in Chicago last week given by a career diplomat. Daniel Benjamin is the current Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. In addition to serving in a recent administration, he specializes in the field of counterterrorism. To hear a man with such credentials assess the state of the world today was affirming, not because it made us listeners happy, but because in this small group, the interface, questions and replies, were as deep as they were wide-ranging.
On the Metra the next day, I asked the conductor for his opinion about humanity, since he sees so much. His answer: You have to be careful. So carefully, I will continue interacting.
I hope you will, too. (c)
