Beyond Thee and Me

"Great minds discuss ideas.

Average minds discuss events.

Small minds discuss people."

--Eleanor Roosevelt

I cringe when I see two people lean in toward each other and say, "Did you hear about Phyllis?"

There is a proportionality between the size of the group we live in, and what we talk about. When all of us lived in our own cave, or community house, we knew almost everything about each other. In large cities, we interact daily with people whose names we might never know.

Martin Buber wrote a book titled, "I and Thou". It was an argument for finding real humanity in tight, face-to-face relationships: not "You and me", but something once caught by having pronouns for tight relationships. Buber was religious. He was actually arguing that God is really personal with us.

The fact is that most of our relationships are not tight and personal. Most of our relationships are casual, informal, and transitory. It needs to be that way. There are events. There are ideas.

It is not a loss that we moved out of our caves and community houses; that we formed towns and cities and nations. It is gain. It is to create something larger and more complex, to enable diversity and art and music and science. In Highlandville, Iowa, there is a marvelous musical group that calls itself the Mabel Symphony. They play polkas and schottisches in the Old Highlandville Schoolhouse. A symphony they are not, but neither are they just fiddlers fiddling on a roof. Perhaps they are an event.

I think it was Harvey Cox who said that we do not live "I and Thou" lives. Most of us live "you and me" lives. Perhaps it is that "I and Thou" are just a small part of what our lives are. Most of it does not have to do with what Phyllis did. In the events of life, and especially in the ideas, we become something better; something larger; something much more interesting.

Comments

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

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