INSTITUTIONAL PEOPLE & FOLK PEOPLE

 Sam Smith – One of the ways that the recent murder of a health insurance CEO is notable is that the dead man’s name was generally only occasionally mentioned. Most of the time it was a CEO who was murdered.

This is just one more sign of how purportedly significant people are increasingly identified by their jobs rather than by their being as humans. If you’re successful in life you are no longer a person but a title.

I learned this during over four decades covering news in DC. My human relationships were with neighbors, local activists and down to earth local officials. The federal figures I covered were in what I would call institutional mindset.

Even living near some nationally prominent folk led to contacts that were far more personal across the street than if I was covering their thoughts and words at a news conference.

The more I think about this, the more I’ve come to realize that this was not just a Washington phenomenon. We live in a society where traditional human relationships don’t have  the standing they once did. We increasingly define ourselves by where and the level that we work.

I have enjoyed life far more than if I had gone along with this thanks to a number of factors. For example, I was a journalist and an author and so basically only had to please one person known as an editor. I became an editor and had even more choice. I helped to start a few organizations which was far more fun than trying to run them years down the road. And I have always made time for the local – ranging from editing a neighborhood newspaper to a one term experience on the board of a DC advisory neighborhood commissioners.  The joy in my life had come from the personal and local rather than the symbolically important.   

For the past decade and a half I’ve been living in a small town in Maine where the power of the personal is even more powerful. Even those with a title have to get along with other humans.

Ironically, one of the national practitioners of this has been Donald Trump because he doesn’t actually know how to run or lead an institution. I was struck by his recent news conference when he went on and on about how to construct a wall to block  immigration. He does better talking about using cement and steel than he does about stopping climate change. And, unfortunately, as liberals have become better educated, they shun such people-level talk.

But if anyone as evil and incompetent as Trump can do well with people talk, perhaps liberals shouldn’t shun it. How do you translate a complicated issue into language millions will understand?  How about some striking tales about climate change? If Trump can do it, maybe Democrats could tell some good stories too.