I was waiting in front of my hotel to be shuttled to the airport, when the early sun revealed a block-long line of homeless souls waiting for food. The light illuminated our closeness, our interchangeable fate, and our kinship. Just then, the Ethiopian bellman, who insisted on loading my bags, began telling me about his three-year-old son who was imitating everything he saw his parents do. The early light spilled on our faces as this elegant man, in his adopted culture’s uniform, said, “We’re careful now what we say and do. He watches and copies everything.”
I looked to the weary waiting in line and realized that we all must be careful of what we say and do. For the gifts and cruelty of one culture are watched and copied into the next, one kindness and harshness at a time. The human experiment depends on what we model and what we imitate from generation to generation. So how do we model care? How do we imitate integrity? How do we acknowledge our kinship? How do we learn to animate our gifts so we can feed each other? Every society begins anew while extending the lineage of community throughout the ages.
A recent issue of Time magazine reported that if all the uprooted individuals… around the world were to form their own country, they would make up the world’s 29th most populous nation, as big as South Korea.
What keeps us from caring for each other? What keeps us from pretending that the world’s twenty-ninth largest population doesn’t exist? Is it our fear that we could so easily be them? Is it our fear that if we give to them, we’ll drown in their despair? Is it our fear that if we give to those in need, we won’t have enough for ourselves and our families? These questions have stirred and thwarted communities and civilizations throughout history. And each generation, each nation, each neighborhood and family, gets to wrestle with these questions freshly. Including us.
It seems the need to reanimate a true sense of community is more important than ever. Under all our differences, our capacity to behold, hold, and repair what we have in common is part of a lineage that goes back to prehistoric clans that survived the elements by caring for each other. We need to recover and extend that lineage of care. I hope this book is a contribution to the reawakening of our common humanity and our common capacity.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, six years after World War II, after the defeat of Hitler and fascism, six years after the Holocaust, in which some of my family perished. As a child, I was frightened by images of the atomic bomb’s obliteration of Hiroshima. In grade school, we practiced hiding under our desks, as if that would keep us from being incinerated. I came of age in the sixties, part of a hopeful generation who questioned the war in Vietnam. I later saw the Berlin Wall come down, and, in time, witnessed the first African-American president sworn in on the steps of a White House built by slaves. During my lifetime, there has been a slow, steady awakening of community that has upheld America as the land of the free. Through all this, I have grown to understand that, different as we are in what we believe, there is no they. We are they.
And so, I try to stay true to what I know while listening to the opposite views of others. Listening this way, I’ve come to see that the underpinnings of our current divisions as a nation fall below politics, below Democrat or Republican. More and more citizens are losing themselves in a world built on fear and hate, where tolerance for difference is tissue paper thin, and their understanding of security is based on striking out against others.
As I witness the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and unprocessed anger that is being unleashed, I fear that our isolation and self-interest, as a government and a people, have poked and stirred the darker angels of our nature. Now, we are forced to take our turn in facing the ever-present challenge: to give in to fear or to empower each other to be brave enough to love, brave enough to discover and accept that we are each other.
For no matter where we come from, no matter how we got here, we all yearn to be seen, heard, and respected. I believe that, under all our fear and brutal trespass, we are innately kind and of the same humanity. Under what divides us, we all long to belong and to be understood. We are they, despite the terrible violence that surfaces between us. And all our gifts are needed to stitch and weave the tapestry of freedom.
From the history of our interactions, we can try to understand what we’ve learned as a human family. Often, we only look to confirm what we already know, but when we can acknowledge what is true or broken, we can engage others, soul to soul. We can put down our arrogance and admit that we’re on the same journey. Then our questions about life create connections. No matter what anyone tells you, we don’t ask questions for answers, but for the relationships they open between us. And when we can admit to all that we don’t know, we begin the weave of community, by keeping what matters visible a little while longer.
But today, I am afraid that the noise of hate is drowning out the resilience of love. I fear that we are tripping into a dark age. And like the medieval monks who kept literacy alive during the Dark Ages in Europe, we are challenged to commit to a life of care and to keep the literacy of the heart alive.
Now, all the things we have in common, all the endeavors of respect that we treasure, all the ways that we find strength in our kindness—all our efforts of heart—matter now more than ever. We are at a basic crossroads between deepening the decency that comes from caring for each other and spreading the contagion of making anyone who is different into an enemy. And, as history has shown through crusades, genocides, and world wars, if we don’t recognize ourselves in each other, we will consume each other.
We must remain open and steadfast in the face of fear and violence. We must never make a principle of the pains and losses that darken our hearts. And we must keep voicing the truth of human decency, no matter the brutalities that try to quiet us. Without this commitment to truth and to caring for others, we will become heartless and lost.
Most of all, we must pick each other up when we are heavy with despair. For the sun doesn’t stop shining because some of us are blind. Nor will the grace of democracy vanish because some of us are afraid to be in the world and react violently out of that fear.
Still, we are they. And the timeless choice between love and fear, as individuals and as a nation, is not a choice of policy. It is the choice of decency that keeps us human. In the face of the disturbances stirred up by fear, I implore you to be kind and truthful, to be a lantern in the dark, and to call out prejudice wherever you see it. In addition to whatever ways each of us is called to gather, participate, legislate, or protest, I implore you to never stop watering the seeds of human decency.
I implore you to stay devoted to the proposition that, when filled with love, we can work as angels here on Earth, using our caring hands as wings.
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Excerpted from Mark Nepo’s new book, More Together Than Alone: Discovering the Power and Spirit of Community in Our Lives and in Our World (Atria Book, July 2018).
As a companion to the book, readers are invited to explore an online community guide so you can gather with others to share your own stories of community and strengthen your ties with others. The guide is available online or as a download.
Video for More Together Than Alone
