We Are History

There are days, weeks, years, shards of decades that I cannot recall with any great clarity.  But I remember with the clearest of vision a slightly chilly but sunny Friday one autumn when I stood on the corner of Walnut Street and Day Avenue in Ridgefield, New Jersey.  With me was one of my senior classmates, Jack.  We just stood there, not knowing what to say or what to believe.  What had just happened was beyond belief.  It could not possibly have happened—not in the present, not in modernity.  The day was November 22, 1963.

Just two hours earlier Jack and I were sitting in study hall in the high school cafeteria, and my biggest challenge was not in the upcoming history test, but in mustering the courage to ask Rose out on a date.  Then the principal came on the loud speaker.  “We have received news that President John F. Kennedy has been shot in Dallas, Texas.”  All heads looked up from their books. Ten minutes later, again the loud speaker.  “We have been told that President John F. Kennedy has died.  We are dismissing school early.”

Jack and I stood for at least two hours on the corner of Walnut Street and Day Avenue trying to come to grips with the fact that we were part of history.

“Jack, things like this, assassination, happen in history books.  Not now.  I can’t believe it.”

Jack shrugged his shoulders.  “What happens now?”

It was my turn to shrug my shoulders.  Filled with the sense of incomprehension, Jack and I finally separated and went home to quiet kitchens, quiet family members, quiet everything except for Walter Cronkite, CBS anchor man delivering the updated news on what happened in Dallas.

My parents and younger brother were in the kitchen watching the one television we shared.  This was not always the case.  My father was a very skillful electrician.  Many years later, I learned from one of his shipmates that my dad had helped save the LST he served on in World War II.  Apparently the ship stopped dead in the water, and this meant that without the protection of the convoy, the ship was a prime target of tailing, stalking Japanese submarines.  My father jury-rigged the electronics of the vessel and got it moving again.  A product of the Depression, my dad thought it wasteful to spend good money on a television, so as a side job he repaired other people’s boob tubes.  In the Bronx we would have three or four sets in different states of repair.  A Philco with sound but no picture.  A Zenith with picture but no sound.  A Crosley with a tuner you turned to just the right spot so that the snow was replaced with something resembling an image.  Sometimes in order to watch a program, we had all three sets going at once.  Eventually when we moved to Ridgefield, my father broke down and bought a second hand RCA (black and white, of course.)

We had three major stations, three networks, and that was the magnitude of our choices.  Later UHF came in which expanded the variety, but not really by much.  And somehow, some way, this affected the way we lived.  There used to exist a phenomenon called “Water Cooler Conversations.”  People in an office would take a break and meet at the water cooler and discuss last night’s news or popular television show.

“Hey, did you watch the Honeymooner’s last night?”
“Yeah.  Art Carney stole it with the Chef of the Future bit.”

“Yeah, I laughed till I cried.”

“Take in Carson last night?”
“Yeah.  Ed Ames throwing the tomahawk and hitting the target in the groin?”
“Yep.  And Carson said, ‘You can’t hurt him any more than that.’”

______________________________________________________________________

“See on the news Krushchev banging his shoe.”

“Yeah.  He’s gonna ‘bury us.’”

“We should nuke his ass.”

______________________________________________________________________

The point is that we all shared the same news, the same entertainments because the choices were limited.  Bad thing?

Things are different today.  I wonder if there are any water cooler gatherings, especially since people bring their own favorite brands of plastic bottles of water?

I remember news anchors like Walter Cronkite, Douglas Edwards, John Cameron Swayze, but they all seemed to cover the same news and pretty much from the same angle. When was “spin” invented?

I bring this up because of a phrase that President Biden used in his inaugural speech.  He said we needed to “unite” as a country.  I agree with him on the necessity of doing so, but I wonder if it is possible?

We seem as a people to be divided up by fractions and factions.  One subculture believes in the need to combat the Covid virus.  Another subculture believes the virus is a hoax.  One faction expresses the need to preserve democratic institutions while another group holds fast to idolatry.  One parcel of Americans believes in a stolen election while another thinks that belief to be a big lie.  One faction holds sacred the Constitution while another seems willing to abrogate the law to satisfy its own ethos.

And the worst part is that psychology tells us the hold a crazy idea has on people is directly proportionate to how many people believe it.  It is harder to eradicate the mistaken idea that the moon is made of blue cheese if 80 million people believe it than if only 1 million believe it.  Recent studies have also demonstrated that the more reasons given for the fact that the moon is NOT made of blue cheese only serves to make the blue cheese believers hold even more steadfastly to their mistaken idea.  So what this does is curtail or eliminate dialogue entirely.  If I am trying to convince my neighbor that the moon is not made of blue cheese, all I am actually accomplishing is strengthening his belief that it is made of blue cheese.

The truth or any objective truth appears to be shattered amongst the variety of social media available to support what we want to be the truth.   The moon is not a satellite of the earth.  It is whatever our favorite cable channel says it is.

So what is there to unite our nation?  What do all these factions have in common?  What commonality can we build on to unite us?  Can the common denominator be the irony that acceptance of diversity itself is a uniting element of American culture?

We don’t all eat the same foods, enjoy the same entertainments, or believe in the same institutions.  Can we define or even describe “American culture?”

If I try to build a bridge to a person who does not believe in vaccinations or climate change or the legitimacy of the presidential election, or the rights of all people to the pursuit of happiness, then what materials can I use to build that bridge?

Ultimately I think the need to belong is stronger than the truth.  Better to be accepted by a small group of narrow minded thinkers than to embrace the concept that diversity is a strength from which all of us benefit.  Not all of us are secure enough to cope with change.

Following President Kennedy’s assassination the depth of the tragedy was felt, I believe, by most, if not all, Americans.  That feeling was palpable.  This is not “things were better” in the old days piece. The sixties had its own stage of racial turmoil, and gatherings around the office water cooler did not usually include women.  As young people we failed then, too,  to understand that every present will become the past, that history occurs every day, that, as Amanda Wingfield cautions her son Tom in Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie,  “You fail to remember that the future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret unless you plan for it.”  The very present we live in will become history, and how do we prepare for that?

The domestic terrorism evident in the storming of the Capitol on January 6^th, was an historical moment that should have united us in its condemnation since it stabbed at the heart of American democracy.  Yet the outrage was not universal.  A number of us crawled back into our caverns of conspiracy theories and false rumors and fears of those not identical to us.  How do we draw them out of their self-imposed, tribal, philosophical bunkers and onto common ground?

Do we, as a people (or should I say “peoples?”), share any common ground?  Common culture?  Or are we crammed into a limited space bound only by geography?