Sam Smith – Growing up in
a comfortable and well-situated family I was first introduced to the real
division in American culture when I was 12 years old - stuffing envelopes in a
campaign that ended 68 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia. It was my
first political event and the first occasion when I was directed by black and
labor union guys.
I had no idea that I had been
introduced to what I would come to regard as the two Americas: one consisting
of the wealthy and powerful and the other represented by neighborhoods,
communities and real people. I would
live in DC as an adult for over four decades and soon found myself not only
with powerful national political figures but also with a black community that would rise to over 70
percent of the population. In the early 1960s I started a neighborhood
newspaper within blocks of the Capitol building, in a community that would also include two of the city’s major
1968 riot strips. In my 20s I was helping the black activist Marion Barry make
some headway, while living in a multicultural
city whose local stories were largely ignored by the mainstream media. And in
my first job at WWDC, an all news radio station, I could expect to cover a
presidential press conference on the same day as a fire or a murder.
The current lack of interest in
the highly varied communities that truly characterize America is an important
reason why the country does not work better these days. We have come to accept
a nation divided by great economic and cultural differences with many not even
trying much to deal with it. Fortunately, I was an anthropology major in
college and learned to see it differently.
One of the factors that is seldom
discussed, for example, is how
television helped to remove community from our lives. These days we give less importance to our neighborhoods and more to the figures who appear on TV. I initially noticed this in part because my
father was in the pre-television New Deal administration and my parents, by the
time I was nine, had started an organic farm in Maine. I was raised to function
in communities as well as sitting before a screen. But it is telling that when
I think of my parents one the images
that quickly comes forth is the television set in their bedroom.
Because I had a brother and four
sisters, I learned in early childhood that the rest of the world wasn’t like me.
I had other experiences such as playing in bands for decades. Playing in a band
includes your solo but most of the time you are backing someone else up.
For seven years I also went to a
Quaker school. Its message to others included this:
Germantown
Friends is a Quaker school …. Friends, of course, have no exclusive claim to
those principles which inform our school, but out of Friends' faith and
practice, with its belief that there is that of God in everyone, flow
simplicity, self-discipline, honesty, community responsibility, non-violent
resolution of differences, and unreserved respect for every individual. We must
constantly affirm these principles, teach them, and protect them.
I recently asked some friends and
relatives who had gone to GFS: if they had to choose between their college and
their high school, which would they pick and all said Germantown Friends. I had
gone to Harvard and agreed.
Throughout my journalism career I
have willingly covered both the national and the local (I even have a Maine
blog). My view of America is that it is run much like a household with bossy
and ambitious parents. We are the children in a national family run by people
like Donald Trump but we can still create a mutual life with others that is
kind, fair and fun. Our problems remain but a lifestyle blended with others
keeps us smiling and doing good things.
The crooked, selfish and mean
powerful are like the weather. We have
to live with them but not let them define us.
