4th of July Edition

A Mindful Miscellany, #17

Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.

Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, dedicated to finding Signal in the Information Apocalypse.

Image Source: Midjourney

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory … will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” – Abraham Lincoln

It’s 4^th of July weekend in America. Hopefully everyone is taking the time to connect with friends and family. It’s hard to tell what everyone is doing. Hopefully most people are carrying on, business as usual, social butterflies, powering through the damage that vax/anti-vax positions did to the relationships in our lives. But I am concerned we’re getting spread out, separated, and disconnected. According to Robert Putnam in “The Upswing”, this trend of disconnection and alienation began in the late 1960s. If we want it to end, we have to collectively decide to end it. That means interacting, relating, and talking. Coming into correspondence, attuning to each other.

I remember being in a plumbing supply store with my uncle a few months ago. As we stood in the checkout line, he just shot the breeze with a guy his age (mid-60’s), complaining about the prices of plumbing materials. I wondered if the younger generations are losing this conversational ability—to simply commiserate with a stranger for a moment, without sticking our noses in our phones or growing offended that someone dare attempt to connect with them. I hope I’m wrong.

I think about my friend Mark, who coaches a little league baseball team. It’s amazing how much you can teach kids through sports — so many lessons about life. He’s building the foundations of their character and they don’t really notice. Kids from some challenging home situations and schools that may not be the best. One play at a time, he’s cultivating work ethic, perseverance, poise, and an ability to think of someone besides themselves.

My cousin is a local reporter out in California. It’s not sexy national news—it’s the day-to-day grind, the micro stories that directly impact the residents of a community. This is a slowly dying profession, and I worry about when we lose these eyes and ears to hold local politicians and businesses accountable to those who live in their vicinity. We will miss the access to ground truth that can guide our conduct and response to the world.

And it’s this connective tissue, these bonds to one another that is under strain in this moment. I hope July 4^th can serve as a reminder—that we have a shared history together. It’s good and it’s bad, just like an individual human life. But it’s ours. It’s a collective, controlled hallucination, this idea of America. It will exist as long as we believe in it, as long as we put nation over party or tribe. My career was devoted to this hallucination, putting what Nassim Taleb calls Soul in the Game in service to it.

There are groups trying to mend the frays and tears of our civic rope, standing in the breach in a time of danger for our Republic. Braver Angels brings Americans together to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic ideals. As individuals, group members try to understand the other side’s point of view, even if they don’t agree with it. In our communities, they engage those they disagree with, looking for common ground and ways to work together. In politics, they support principles that bring us together rather than divide us.

At the end of the day, it’s not going to be some great man or woman that can save us. It has to come at the ground level, the grassroots level, what in the Navy we call the “deckplate” level. It has to come from all of us. From the slow accumulation of small acts that add to the pattern, to the warp and weft of our collectiveness. We have to decide to do it, together. I hope that we do. Happy 4th of July.