Breaking Sad
Instead of watching made-up stories that ultimately isolate us, we can live a real one.
From “The Problem with Processed Storytelling,” by Richard Brody, The New Yorker, March 12, 2013:
… As we moderns become more isolated — more occupied with our virtual lives, more distracted by a greater flow of information and stimulation — …the illusion of human connection by way of stories becomes all the more alluring. And that’s why, in the age of the Internet, the success of TV series is self-perpetuating: the plethora of online discussion they spark drives viewers further into online isolation and makes them all the hungrier for contact with characters and their stories.
When people were crowded with people, and life was teeming with immediate, maybe oppressive, contact, whether in small-town moral surveillance or in urban family tumult, the pictures — not, metaphorically, movies over all, but the images themselves — provided a kind of imaginative escape, blasted open a realm of imagination and fantasy that was, though collective in access, weirdly and fiercely personal in effect. It was the public invention of a new kind of privacy, a new kind of inwardness. Now, the proliferation of stories is the very sign of collective isolation, the obsessive fascination with characters a mark of frustration of contact….
Meanwhile:
Remember the Wampanoag
We can watch stories that make us feel alone. We can also inhabit stories that bring us together. For instance, as the curtain rises in Plymouth in 1621…
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag gather to break bread, celebrate their new friendship, and envision their bright future together. But this spirit of tolerance and peace…
… didn’t last long. Within a generation, war would erupt and the Wampanoag would ultimately lose their political independence and much of their territory. Eventually, so did members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Navajo, Sioux, and Apache nations, among many others. It’s been a long, tragic trail of tears for Native Americans, with no end in sight.
That’s the bad news.
Here’s the good news: The adventure that began in Plymouth with the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag isn’t over yet. The dream of a “more perfect union” lives on (I think). The next chapter of the American story is now being written, and the pens are in our hands (I hope).
Happy Thanksgiving.
I stopped watching American TV. American youth has lost itself in the “great whining “. In Israel every day I meet people that lost homes, family members, legs, arms, all kinds of horror and they carry on! They make peace with their grief and their new limitations, but they go on living full lives and helping others. That's the spirit that is so inspiring no marvel movie will compare to it!