I am not a Duke basketball fan, but the Cameron Crazies make me smile. Crazy face paintings. They are in the game together; individual hearts rise and fall together with every made and missed basket. I don’t have to cheer for their school to appreciate the feeling of being swept up in a group.
The night before the big game with the Tar Heels, I was one of the spectators at a school play at the Hawbridge School in Saxapahaw. Our friends invited us to the performance of The Wizard of Oz. What a gift! From Dorothy and the Wicked Witch to the large chorus of Munchkins, the students were all amazing. The stage sets were beautiful, and the costumes were superb.
Chatham County is my home, and I have attended equally terrific theater performances at our local high schools. This is not a competition between theater departments, such as the one between colleges on Tobacco Road. The unity I felt was not against any rival. As an outsider to the school and town, I still felt part of the team. Though I didn’t have a child in the show, I rooted for those young people as if they were indeed my own.
Last week was also Election Day. Citizens were divided into two warring political camps. On both sides, there was degradation and even demonization of the other. More than eighty years ago, French philosopher Simone Veil questioned the premise of political parties. “A political party is a machine, an organization designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its members. The ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth.” Those are sobering words, which seem as relevant today in America as in Weil’s Europe. The growth of one party may even come at the expense of the country’s overall good.
Weil, however, was not hopeless. “Contradiction,” she wrote, “is a lever of transcendence.” This seems paradoxical, yet diversity might break the social pressures that, like gravity, seem to pull us into the same groups of people who think like us and vote like us. In sharing experiences with those who are different from us, we might just discover we share more in common.
As an outsider at Hawbridge School, I felt a spirit of transcendence. Another writer, Flannery O’Connor, claimed, “Everything that rises must converge.” I experienced a new community by being lifted out of my typical tribe. The key was the collective support of the younger generations, a goal that we should all share. Are not all children finally our children?
