tangentwoman

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Lots of feelings

I'm in Los Angeles for a conference, and I'm running on very little sleep today. I was feeling no effects yesterday of having woken up at 4:15 a.m. Eastern time and going to bed at 10:30 Pacific. I had a chance to exercise when I got here yesterday afternoon; I caught up with lots of former co-workers who I like a lot; I did an adequate job of schmoozing at the reception. All was well, and I even read a little before falling asleep, whereas normally I feel so dehydrated and exhausted after a cross-country flight that I pass out the second my head hits the pillow.

This morning, I got up around 4:30, trying to stay roughly on East Coast time. I got to the gym before it got completely packed, luckily (when I arrived, there was only one other person in there, using the free weights. 45 minutes later, every machine was taken and there were five people waiting).

But, once I was back in my room, I started feeling queasy and dehydrated (the downside of going to the gym so early: nowhere to buy water so early) and exhausted.

And then, before I went down to breakfast, I turned on the Today Show, and heard about Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who killed himself last week. And I cried, and cried, and cried. I couldn't stop. Not only for the loss of this poor kid who held so much promise, and his family, and his friends, but also because the whole story made me think we've completely lost it as a society. It seems much bigger than these three kids in Jersey. I remember one of my professors in grad school obsessively banging the drum that bullying is a public health issue, but in the seven or eight years since I heard her make that case, the world has completely changed, and it's staggering to me how rampant bullying is.

I'm really not someone who believes that technology has led to the downfall of society (although I remember another class in grad school during which, even before Facebook or Twitter existed, we hotly debated whether the Internet has improved or eroded social ties), but it does make it much easier to give in to our worst instincts, present the worst versions of ourselves, very quickly, impulsively, and often irreparably. The best versions of ourselves, too, I guess; it's extraordinary to see the outpouring of support and generosity of people who can send a text message to help people in Haiti or click a few buttons to join a bone marrow registry in response to a plea from a stranger across the country. But this morning, it just all seemed incredibly grim, how callously we treat each other, how easily we can ruin each other, seemingly for no other reason than that we can.

So I was a bit of a mess, and then during one of our sessions this morning, we heard from the guy who wrote the book that was turned into the movie The Soloist, about the Julliard graduate who ended up playing a two-stringed violin on the streets of LA after he developed serious mental illness and the LA Times columnist who befriended him. And the columnist talked about the reaction of his readers after the initial column ran: the packages started pouring in, filled with violin strings, and violins, and a cello. People heard a story that pulled at their hearts; they saw a need and did what they could to meet it; they saw an injustice and did what they could to correct it. And I nearly broke down crying again, because there are also really, really good people in the world, who care about each other, who care about people they've never even met. And I have to believe that there are more of them than there are awful, selfish, thoughtless people. But I'm not sure that I do quite believe that, today.

Rutgers already had in the works a big campaign for civility, and I guess that's a start. But how depressing that we've gotten to the point where we need a two-year campaign by a university to teach us what we all learned, or should have, in kindergarten. And I remember it being reinforced in...second grade, I think? We had a class pledge that we recited every day, or at least every week. The only part I remember clearly was, "Care and share. Respect all others." That's a pretty good guiding principle, right? 25 years later, I'd probably add, "Think carefully before you hit the Send button," but it otherwise holds up. Let's all recommit ourselves to living it.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home