John and I don’t agree on politics at all. There have been many times when I vowed to block his dogged comments on Facebook. It annoyed me that, at least from my perspective, he could be so uninformed, so stubbornly firm in his views. An adult discussion didn’t seem possible.
Last week, he added a note to his birthday wishes, noting the degree of our disagreement, adding a very sweet comment about how much he appreciated my musings about our commonalities in Brooklyn at Our Lady of Perpetual Help school and our summers in Lake Carmel. He told me that my memories brought him back to the “best times in his life.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather! Some background to this …
Our school, Our Lady of Perpetual Help (OLPH) was divided into two parts. The girls attended classes on the 59th Street side and the boys on the 60th street side. You rarely came in contact with members of the opposite gender and so, when John and I did finally identify ourselves as OLPH students, it wasn’t until I had moved from Brooklyn and met him on the beach in Hill and Dale, a residential enclave in Carmel, N.Y.
For Brooklynites, one’s identity was wrapped up in the parish you belonged to and school you attended. It was as if we had found a long-lost relative since no one we knew in Carmel had ever heard of our school. We could talk about Mello rolls, a Halloween where you dressed as a beggar and asked for money, about the wonderous libation called an “egg cream,” going to mass every day, the Sisters of St. Joseph and, of course, the Dodgers.
That was it. Just the unique experience of finding someone from your “hometown.”
A lot of years went by… eons … and John lived in the recesses of my memory as the only kid from OLPH who also knew where Carmel was.
John’s name popped up when I went searching for alumni connections at OLPH. I found him on Facebook.
My opening query was about summers at Hill and Dale and I thought I had begun what would be warm memories of the wonderful education that we both received at OLPH as well as a sifting of the 1950 summers that we knew … a time that, for us who lived then, was innocently without guile. Did he remember the Sagers, the Dill brothers, Gail Dusenbery? Did he take piano lessons from the nuns?
Somehow politics reared its head and our exchanges were not what I had expected. I mean they were pointedly awful. There could be no discussion, only barbs flung back and forth about the relative merits and demerits of the politicians in the news. I blocked him several times.
After all, John wasn’t some long-lost BFF, only the adult version of an acquaintance that remained a tie to a part of my younger life. I even contemplated “unfriending” him … the sina qua non of rejection.
Somehow, politics has become the sieve of perception, the halo effect of interpersonal judgement. The climate created by those who foster the “us” and “them” of politics separate us from our commonalities. The things that unite us have lost their power to allow discourse beyond the flinging of insults and accusations; they have little power to overcome bizarre conspiracy theories that construct realities of their own, engendering abominable behaviors. I wonder who profits from this? It has cost many of us family and friends. This doesn’t strengthen us as a people, a nation.
Political differences have created cartoon versions of adult behaviors. I keep reminding myself of what Margaret Mead said about the power of a group of people with the same mind. What could be accomplished without this malignant divider?
Are we not more than our political opinions? And, again, the question: Who profits from this?
Returning to my birthday greeting, John’s greeting illustrated this conundrum perfectly:
“You and I disagree on many things, but I am sure that you will agree on this. Every time you post something about your time in Brooklyn and Carmel, it throws me back to the greatest time in my life – the many friends I made, the dances at local churches and at the beach in Hill and Dale, and the Club House. My folks house there. I’ll remember and cherish those times until my last breath. Thank you for those trips to my cherished reminders.”
To all my friends and family from Brooklyn and Carmel and Syracuse and Marcellus, Rochester and surrounding municipalities: I may not agree with your take on government, but I do appreciate the you who you are and all of the things that unite us. Let’s see what good we can do in the world together.
