All posts by Gary C. Woodward

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Grievances Arising from Covid and Beyond

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We may want to act, but in some cases the best we can do is react.

One of the apparent effects of long-term stress is that we are more inclined to engage only to assert rather than listen. We seek the psychological release of airing our feelings, leaving our conversational partners to function only as recipients of accumulated complaints. Add in the sour national political mood, and additional stressors of everything ranging from getting children vaccinated, to acknowledging existential threats like climate change, and we are ready to reload our rhetorical canons and keep firing.

Under these circumstances, becoming active and empathetic listeners is all the harder. Most of our energy has already been sapped by rumination and complaints. We are hardly prepared to pay what I once called the “energy surcharge” of active listening that requires taking the time to focus on the feelings of others. You can check yourself on this by recalling the last time you felt the need to write done what another was saying.

Anecdotally, we see forms of “unloading on another” all the time: in videos of passengers arguing with airline agents, unhappy customers using the frail medium of the phone to lodge complaints, or in news reports of political rallies, where everyone present seems to be on a short fuse.

Reaction as a Substitute for Action

In times of stress we may want to act, but in most cases the best we can do is react. And so our rhetoric turns expressive and argumentative in the hope that our words will achieve what seems to be beyond our direct control. For example, it was one thing during the height of the pandemic to be warned that we should stay out of crowded spaces. But for some it was a step too far that our favorite travel destination or restaurant was temporarily off limits. We seem unable to accept a message that requires altering our most fervent intentions: a condition that can launch us into a high rhetorical orbit. Even in the face of solid evidence, hearing an alienating “no” from another is rarely going to be accepted as the last word.

Then, too, there is the apparent promise of an end to the global nightmare of COVID, though that moment seems further off than first thought. And no sooner have its life-threatening negatives begun to subside than other pandemics of social resentments have become more virulent. The many work and family displacements from COVID that added hardships seems to have emboldened many to press forward with ongoing demands for greater gender parity, friendlier workplaces, better childcare, less sexual and racial bias, and corporate reform. An insistence to be heard first and engage later has added new challenges to previously settled relationships. Interactions with employers, family members and even friends now seem more cautious and transactional. They define the current period of superheated identity politics that has become fully transformational: perhaps unwanted by many, but no less real.

With so many interpersonal bonds in flux, it can be hard to know whether the future holds more rebukes, or a placid period of exhaustion and quiescence when we might again hear each other with more understanding.

Seventy years ago, the nation still waited for needed forms of human empowerment. But news of the new polio vaccine created a wonderful pause while the nation celebrated its good fortune. Polio would no longer claim more of its children. In contrast, we seem to be in a time when embedded social inequalities have seeded resentments that have made the nation less interested in savoring our successes.

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Do We Still Notice Neighborhoods?

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In the heyday of its usage decades ago, “neighborhood” carried connotations of an entire micro-geography known especially well to its children. It represented the most important of all places: home.

“There goes the neighborhood” has been a punchline for innumerable jokes over the years, some unfortunately racist. But I like the line as Rodney Dangerfield used it when he heard that a friend had bought a nearby burial plot. In the heyday of its usage decades ago, the idea of a “neighborhood” carried connotations of an entire micro-geography that was usually well known to its children.  The lines connecting the rest of the world were then more easily mapped out in steps rather than URLs.

Like most pre-adolescents growing up in the middle of the last century, I roamed these nearby streets and saw friends “just a few doors down the block.” An urban or suburban child’s world was mostly contained in the 20 or 30 homes that shared the same adjoining streets. The quarter acre lots in a typical city meant that schoolmates and the occasional weird neighbor were close at hand. And since children used to spend hours of “free range” roaming in their neighborhoods, the quirks of the place were as well-known as the picked-over ruins of an ancient town. Parents were usually happy to have their offspring out of the house, with the proviso to “be home in time for dinner.”  It was often true for the next generation as well. If we couldn’t find our daughter in a late afternoon, a call to the folks next door or to the elderly couple behind our house usually located her.  She and her brother did a much better job of collecting neighborhood friends than their parents.

 

The Inward Turn to Screen Time

The Washington Post recently noted that “the average American child spends five to eight hours a day in front of a digital screen, often at the expense of unstructured play in nature.” What an unnatural and inward turn this endless screen time represents, at least when compared to the childhoods observed by writers like Annie Dillard,1 Bill Bryson,2 or Lin-Manuel Miranda.3

If you were still in your first decade of life, the rules of a typical middle-class family usually meant that two blocks joined by an alley or back fences were the outer boundaries for exploration. Becoming a little older meant that more distant parks and stores were fair game, within easy reach on the freedom machine of a bicycle. Of course, there was always a chance of being crushed by a neighbor’s 70s-era car with the brakes and steering of a boat. Somehow most of us managed to stayed clear enough to survive.

I now think of the idea of a neighborhood now as mostly a real estate variable, meaning an area of “comparable” properties closest to the home that buyers are considering. The term seems to have lost earlier echoes of richness that included a specific topography and a web of interpersonal connections. Cul-de-sacs and some apartment buildings are still likely to preserve some of this intimacy; linear streets, not so much.  With many exceptions, courteous but cool relations with the folks down the street seem like the norm.

Overall, identifying one’s own neighborhood added what is now missing in the lives of so many: a sense of place. The common experiences of neighbors can add meaning to the simplest of activities. They make the world seem less alien or strange: a positive perception that was more likely when stories about the abuse and safety of children were less prominent. A good deal of that local and less dire news has died with city newspapers, leaving aggregated national news with troubling events that scare parents.  Now, even front yards and neighborhood roaming are usually off limits.

As physical spaces, the idea of neighborhoods has not gone away, but they also seem less important as seedbeds supporting the important work of connecting with others. Serendipitous encounters help take the strangeness out of a community. And friendly neighbors have always been good for sharing an onion, a tool, or a child.

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1 An American Childhood, 1987
2 The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, 2006
3 In the Heights, 2021.