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.

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