Month: May 2015

Two summers ago, I went to my high school reunion. It was at Corner Pub in downtown Nashville. It was almost like a joke that no one wanted to tell out loud: 60 Catholic school alumni walk into a bar, and the bartender says, “Welcome home.”

I was sitting at a table with my friends Maria and Jenny, and some other people we knew. Our other classmates gradually walked in as the night went on. At one point, a handful of people we knew came in. Jenny looked up, saw them, and said, “Here come some more old friends I haven’t talked to in five years.” And then she got up and reintroduced herself to people she had already known for a long time.

As I watched her do that, I felt the loss of so many friends who had become strangers to me. I was in a place surrounded by people whose presence felt so familiar and yet so strange all at once. I had made promises with some of them to keep in touch after graduation. We exchanged email addresses and phone numbers. We connected with each other on Facebook and other social media outlets. And, for awhile, we kept our promises.

But after the first 2-3 years of college, we drifted away from each other. Phone calls and emails went unmade and unsent. We became preoccupied with school work and other personal matters. Some people who left town to go to school stayed away from Nashville during holidays and breaks. And, before any of us ever knew it, it was as if we never knew each other at all. All those memories of spending time together in middle school cross country practice, chatting by each other’s lockers during high school morning breaks, encouraging each other during hard times, and attending each other’s extracurricular events ultimately meant nothing. We had become just another face in each other’s yearbooks.

Time is a fickle and capricious being. It can bring great people into our lives who love us unconditionally, who cheer for our successes, who hold us up during the hardest parts of our lives, and who actively seek our good, even if it means sacrificing for our sakes.

But it can also separate us from those we’ve grown to love. The same forces that turn acquaintances into best buddies can also do the reverse. This happens a lot during young adulthood. As people grow older, time and distance can take them apart. They leave town to go to college or grad school, or head out after graduation to pursue the jobs they’ve been preparing for. They get married and have kids of their own to care for. Those new responsibilities keep them preoccupied, and rightfully so.

And people try to be understanding with each other, and give each other space to do what they need to do to care for their families and attend to the responsibilities of daily life. Sometimes they give each other space to the point where they’re no longer a part of each other’s lives. But still an unspoken pain exists; a yearning to return to the days when they were a tangible presence in each other’s lives, and not a mere phantom. “Liking” each other’s Facebook posts and sending texts and emails can only do so much to ease the pain.

For me personally, I’ve always struggled to build friendships with others. I’ve been very quiet and shy my whole life, so working up the courage to reach out to people and get to know them is very hard for me. And I know I’ve lost touch with so many great people who have been a part of my life. And it hurts to think about it. I see people all around me who have friends they’ve known since childhood, and I wonder if I could ever form a life-long bond like that with someone else. I wonder if adulthood will separate me from those friends who loved me when I was young and foolish.

To those who are my friends now, please don’t be a stranger. Your presence in my life is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, I’m eternally grateful for your love throughout the years, and I never want it to end. To those who have lost touch with me: I haven’t forgotten you, and I’m sorry if I did anything that caused us to drift apart. You’ve always had a special place in my heart, and are more than welcome to come back into my life if you ever need me. I’m always here for you no matter what. To all of you: you’ve become a part of me, and of my life, whether you acknowledge it or not. It is as the poet John Donne once wrote: “No man is an island.” Please don’t let us become islands. I love and miss all of you.

I detest clichés. As someone who studied English in college, it bothers me when I see the latest catchphrase creep into so many aspects of our cultural dialogue. Over the past several decades, this problem has afflicted America’s political debates. Rick Perry sneers that Social Security is “a Ponzi scheme.” Democrats wield their belief in “social justice” like a club to bash their right-leaning opponents over the head and accuse them of being uncaring. (Notice they never define this phrase or describe what it entails). Leftists like to “tax and spend” to solve the country’s problems. Right-wing folk “cling to their guns and religion.” I’ve been tired of it all for awhile now, and I’m sure many of my readers agree with me.

Any form of conversation stagnates if it is laden with the same trite mantras. When bread sits out for more than a day, it grows stale. But shibboleths seem to sit on the shelf forever, even if they have been rotten for awhile. Most Americans know that Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy motto was “Walk softly and carry a big stick.” But I’ll ask you readers to guess the author of the following quotation without looking it up: “The life of a nation is secure only when the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.” This saying is very wise, and the person who said it is well-known. (Hint: Go back about 150 years in American history).

With next year being a federal election year, we’ll be forced to sit through the same cycle again. One or more of the candidates will say something either incredibly stupid or newsworthy, but nothing particularly intelligent or noteworthy. And it’ll seep into our national vocabulary the same way Ebola spread around the world last year.

But that’s not the worst of it. Wait until the candidates disagree with each other on an important issue. That’s when the real stupidity begins. It’s like Oprah is back on TV, and she’s giving away cows to the studio audience. *Oprah points to different people* “You have a cow, you have a cow, you have a cow, you have a cow! And let’s all have a cow because we disagree over our political viewpoints!” For crying out loud, let’s not put on our big boy and big girl pants and talk to each other like mature human beings! Let’s not try to connect with each other on an intellectual level! That’s too hard. Instead, let’s throw around the words bigotry, hatred, and discrimination the same way a sailor cusses. It’s too hard for us to make reasoned arguments. So we’ll go with ad-hominem attacks instead. It’s easier to do that.

And people wonder why the US has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the world. Perhaps this could be one of the reasons. Even though I rarely watch TV, I especially have no desire to do so during election season. Because it always seems like the person with the popular catchphrase wins the White House, or the person who can make the most voters believe that their opponent is stupid and evil.

The quote I mentioned above was from Frederick Douglass. Even though the political process was messy back in his day (like it is in ours), he and his contemporaries could at least make it seem like a politician’s job had some class and dignity. To give another example, Daniel Webster once said this: “Justice is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.” I don’t think any politicians could write a sentence like that today. Our vocabulary is too small to make it happen. As a concerned citizen, I wish we demanded more from our political candidates and campaigns. And so I have a few requests to make of my readers.

Conservatives and libertarians: don’t blather on about “freedom” and “rights.” Tell people what they are, what they’re good for, if there are any legitimate reasons to restrict people’s actions, and what role your definition of freedom plays in making our country better than the one we have now. Liberals: It bugs me to hear your talk about “change” and “progress” without knowing what goal you have for it, how you intend to get there, and why we should want to go to some of these places you’re taking us to. If any of you, you matter what political persuasion you are, want to act like a parrot, do your fellow citizens a favor and go hang out at the zoo. If you’re repeating what someone else has already said, it’s not cool anymore. It’s old.

But if you don’t want to do that, then do something more productive. Research the issues our country is facing from a variety of angles, take some time to reflect upon what you’ve discovered, come up with your own opinions, and say something original about what’s going on. Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow don’t have your voice. You do. Use it, say something intelligent, and hope to God that no one else steals your idea, unless you want to be the inventor of the next big thing that grows fungus within a week.