Face to face

Dear Ronda,

You got me thinking. And now what I sometimes do when I think is write. Sometimes the writing takes the form of a letter – usually not sent. This form helps me to think more specifically and personally than I otherwise might. You should consider also that these are half-baked ideas. But I mean that in the way my mom used to make pie. She made up two pies, baked one for us to eat that evening at supper, the other went into the freezer to be baked and eaten later. But this disclaimer allows me to leave some of these ideas less than finished.

This starts with your welcoming me to Facebook. I grimaced some reluctance. And here I am. I know more about Dani and Sydney than I otherwise would. Seen some terrific photos. Responded with a comment to your post, and now, we might spend a little time with you face to face.

As with so many things, there is no simple general statement that amounts to much. Having spent some time in the Facebook culture, I can make more sharp criticisms to go along with uneasy intuitions than before. But it’s not a thing where the unquestionable good means that the unanswerable question of whether the world would be better off without Facebook should be passed off as irrelevant.

I am not going there, now, because I have something more important to talk about. We are years apart in our friendship. We are friends, I believe, primarily because we were neighbors once. The non-virtual quantity time we spent together, along with the fact that we liked each other, mattered. (not really intending to play off Facebook’s use of the word ‘like’ – Facebook’s algorithms are playing off the way human beings interact – but you see how this works – how many times did we ‘like’ each other and then we were in each other’s feeds?)

I am very grateful for the positive things technology provides for my life. And yet, our culture is socially less healthy than it was when I was growing up. That is a huge general and unsupportable statement. There are so many pockets in our human culture then and now that were both good and bad. I will pick and choose to support my argument.

My parents grew up in a culture in which it was normal to drop in on neighbors – food would be brought out. Talk, music and so on – without the distractions of TV, internet. Traveling always involved stopping at relatives. People stayed with us. And we might do that with you. Not without Facebook, but not because of it, either. We want to spend time with you because you are our friend. We built that friendship over time. Other aspects of modern culture have in a sense prevented us from maintaining a more face to face relationship. (How do people end up so far apart? This discussion can become fiendishly complex.)

I also prefer the Lawrence culture to the hometown Hillsboro culture. The relative anonymity allows people to be different from each other. If nothing else, it’s easy not to go to church. Except that, ideological nonsense aside, that very church culture was a very healthy human culture. People’s needs (if you were ‘in’ the community) were met. There was probably some backbiting.

I am not trying to be consistent, except to argue that our face to face social relationships are lacking in our culture in general. I, of course, find ways to be a healthy, social human being. Maybe I was raised right.

The question for me is not simply how to make healthy people, but to at least create cultural pockets in which it is easier to live well. In the old vernacular, many people are being ‘lost’ in a culture driven by consumerism and a virtual media world and excessive busyness.

It is not the case, for example, that recorded music gives you the same experience as listening to a live performance. Yes, I don’t want to live without recorded music. But let me repeat myself, going to hear an old farts band play in a local roadhouse, having some beers and sweet potato fries, and yes - three couples got up and danced among the tables - is not the same thing as Paul Simon on the CD player. Are we talking apples and oranges?

Local music and local almost everything else is being squeezed out by bigger and better. And yes, dammit, Paul Simon is better than almost any local band. Does it matter than you can’t shake his sweaty hand after listening to him? There’s much more to this than most of us recognize. We exist in this culture, after all.

I was aiming to keep this under a thousand words because I intend for you to read this. I am not looking for a response ‘in kind.’ Just tell me if I’m on the right track.

I have been observing people who are socially healthy. I doubt if I am the only one who values some of the face to face stuff I get by going to places where those values are the norm. My coffee shop is such a place. I stop in several times a week for an hour or two. There are old guys like me who like to occasionally hang out there. Merle knits. Dennis always has currant iced tea. Verne is a droner – you want to avoid getting caught in his vortex. But what are you going to do? He belongs as much as the rest of us. And I know many of the baristas better than your daughters. It’s interrupted time there. There’s a shipload of banter. But there is time – I go in to Aimee’s when it’s slow – for us to get to know each other a little.

Let me tell you about Bailie. I met her about a year ago. She just turned twenty. Been with her boyfriend for almost three years. Plays tenor sax with a rock band. Is studying film at KU, about to finish. She’s sometimes unsure of herself. Feels that she’s always second. That other people sometimes don’t like her, that they think she’s not that pretty. You know how some of that goes. Sometimes she forgets herself and starts dancing to the music on the player, her pony tail bouncing among the leaves tattooed on her bare left shoulder.

I’m telling you, Ronda, it’s her world I care about. It’s a tough, fragmented world for her to try to live well in. I think she’s mostly happy. She’s working hard and doing well.

That topped a thousand and I’m only getting started. My algorithm? I’ll take a smile and a hug over a heckuva lot of Facebook likes.