Session Highlights:
I'd just finished a speaking event with some progressive writers and activists and we were meeting with people who'd stayed after to say hello, have a book signed, or share some thoughts about the evening.
After saying goodbye to the man I'd been talking to, I lifted my head and my eyes locked with a middle-aged woman who'd been standing behind him. Her wide smile dissolved almost immediately, and tears welled up in her eyes as she leaned in to speak.
"I am a Fox News orphan." she blurted out as she grabbed my wrist, her voice trembling.
She continued, now sobbing loudly, "My family no longer accepts me, which is just as well. I hear what they say now, and I don't recognize them anymore."
The woman detailed the slow erosion of her connection to the people she'd lived with her entire life; people who suddenly felt like strangers and enemies, people she'd just as soon avoid altogether now.
“Things they raised me to believe in,” she said, “things like compassion, kindness, and diversity, are now the very reasons they ridicule me. Fox News and this President have driven us apart, and I don't know if we can be fixed."
Her story was heartbreaking and it was tragic—but it wasn't at all unusual. The room that night (just like this country) was filled with people like her: Fox News orphans, MAGA family refugees, and Trump-Train widows. I hear their stories dozens of times a day.
They are grown children, turned away by their parents.
Siblings driven apart in loud tantrums or in quiet disconnection.
Extended family members relegated to superficial small talk at holiday gatherings.
Spouses feeling a new alienation in one another's presence.
Neighbors avoiding eye contact across hedges.
Church friends exchanging uncomfortable silences.
They are people forced into isolation, or choosing it out of self-preservation.
Right now, the relational disconnection this Presidency has yielded is growing, the tensions are pulled tighter, and the space between people is enlarged. And because of this, we need to talk about loneliness and community.
The reason we go to the movies or read a book look at artwork or listen to music—is to see something of ourselves reflected back at us, to feel connected to other people, to find affinity in the experience of being human.
And the reason we create and express ourselves is to make that kind of connection in the opposite direction: to say to the world: here is my story. Knowing we are part of a shared story is often what tethers us to hope when difficulty comes. That shared story is called community and community is the antidote to one of the greatest sicknesses we have here: loneliness.
We are always fighting the feeling that we are alone—in our worries, our values, our fears; that we are the last of an endangered species, that no one feels what we feel or cares about what we care about—especially when we are surrounded by so much discord, so many opposing opinions, so much tribalism.
Most of us wade into crowds of strangers every day on social media hoping to find people who see something we see, who are outraged by something we’re outraged by, someone who is asking a question we are asking. Ultimately, we want to know, that we’re not alone and we’re not crazy, and if we’re crazy we’re in really good company. We want to be seen.
I imagine part of the reason you’re here is that you wanted to be in a community of like-hearted people: to gather with human beings who care about the world in the ways that you do and I imagine it is a help to know that you have your people, that you are visible.
As we think about the need for the pull of community, we can begin to understand what motivates us and what motivates other people: how can so many people fall in line with hateful movements or organizations? How do so many claim faith in a God of love, yet exist in communities that seem anything but loving? How can an otherwise reasonable person join a movement that is predatory toward them? The desire to be seen and known, to belong.
A few years ago, when the pandemic began, it exacerbated a problem that was already present: disconnection. We know that in general, this pulling away has been happening for a while, even as online community has grown exponentially. We’ve seen the evidence: people texting instead of calling one another, families spending less time eating dinner together, people less aware of their neighbors, and human beings with fewer opportunities for meaningful connection with people around them. The pandemic introduced forced geographic distance in addition to emotional distance—and we have an epidemic of loneliness, which is why story-sharing and community-building are so critical.
Loneliness is often at the heart of despair and relationships make us feel less alone, community makes us feel less alone. One of the goals of loving human beings is the genuine desire to make people feel less alone.
Human beings want to be known. They want to be heard.
I do. You do. And here’s a secret:
So do the people we don’t like.
So do the people we despise.
So do the people whose politics make our blood boil.
So do people who join cults of personality that damage even them.
Billions of people are all here together—and terrified of being alone.
That’s a recurring truth that we’ll want to hold onto during this study and beyond it: no one is immune from the collateral damage of being human, as uncaring as they seem, as insensitive as we think they are, as callous as they may appear from the outside. They are fighting the fear of being alone.
A life oriented toward empathy acknowledges the fear of being alone. We see behavior and confront words and actions and we debate opinions and we call out injustices—but we understand that there is an invisible place of origin of those visible things that we need to consider.
So, today be mindful of the epidemic of loneliness out there, about the fact that no one is immune from the painful collateral damage of being human.
Question: How am I participating in or cultivating regenerative community? As we think about isolation and loneliness as places that serve as barriers to empathetic exchanges, what are you thinking about possible solutions to dismantle those relational barriers, either individually or collectively?
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