The Middle of Everywhere (38 page)

Schwartz argues that freedom can be experienced as tyranny. "If you are free to do anything you want, you find there isn't anything you want to do." What seems best is freedom within constraints. Traffic laws are an example of how constraints give us more freedom. Language is another. With language you can say everything, but not anything.

For the first time in history, large numbers of people can lead the kinds of lives they want, unlimited by economics or culture. However, emotional depression is ten times more likely now than at the turn of the twentieth century. It seems counterintuitive that more choice leads to more depression. However, when we increase people's opportunities for control, we increase their expectations of control and their sense of responsibility for failure. When we have more choices in every domain, we must spend more time researching choices and negotiating these decisions with family members. Never in the history of the world have so many people spent so much time making decisions.

At one time cultures restricted options and circumscribed choices. Traditional morality served as preventive medicine protecting people from themselves. But, in a global shopping mall, many of the constraints from culture disappear. For our own positive mental health, we need to reconstruct some constraints. It is no accident that retreat centers are an increasingly popular vacation spot. Retreats restrict choice and thus, paradoxically, allow certain kinds of freedom. Another example of constraints is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights crafted by Eleanor Roosevelt at the United Nations after World War II. These rights exist for all people wherever they are. They set bottom-line limits about the choices governments have.

Cicero asked a question that's relevant today: "What is the set of rules that makes freedom possible?" The ideal culture would have exactly the right number of choices to maximize freedom and control in every domain. While citizens should have more choices than they are allowed under repressive regimes, prosperous American teens should have fewer. The perfect culture would be neither an authoritarian nightmare nor an existential Disney World.

E. M. Cioran wrote, "A civilization evolves from agriculture to paradox." As the world changes rapidly and becomes more riddled with paradoxes, we must deal with all that complexity. The challenge is to change in ways that allow us to experience our lives as continuous wholes. To be healthy, we must make choices to restrict choices.

We must prepare ourselves for a future that has arrived. We must educate our children to be global citizens who can live with all the paradoxes of identity, who can change while retaining a core of self. We want to give them the minimum daily requirements for identity. Otherwise, they will have a hard time holding on to their humanity in a world that increasingly defines them as consumers.

Identity is formed by art, writing, dance, music, and other forms of self-expression. It develops by answering questions about the self, whether via philosophy class, self-analysis, or psychotherapy. The questions are universal questions—Who am I? What do I want? How am I like other people? How am I different from other people? Am I a good person? Am I a talented person? Do I have something to offer? Am I loved?

To survive in this new century we all need what refugees need. We must adapt to a world that shifts constantly under our feet. We must be resilient or we will be lost. We need families who love us and will help us, rituals and traditions, and contact with the natural world and with our history. We need communities of friends to hold our lives in place and reasonable conditions in the external world—livable wages, decent schools and health care, safe streets, and opportunities to advance.

In a global village, identity is built by having the attributes of resilience and good moral character. In a world of infinite options, humans need a simple core identity and a solid set of values to sort through all the choices. To quote Beethoven, "Character is fate." Without a moral compass to guide behavior, one is adrift. One risks being swept along in the current of impulsive hedonism or running aground entirely, paralyzed by having the responsibility to choose without the wisdom.

Our moral sense becomes our global positioning system. A man told me that when he was a boy his Ozark grandmother told him that when we are born each of us has a soul like a clear blue pool of water. We are responsible for the care of our pool. Every day we make choices that will keep the water clear or make it muddy. The grandmother said, "When I get to heaven, I'll wait for you. The first thing I'm going to do when you get there is take a look at the color of the water in your pool." The man said, "Knowing my grandmother is waiting has kept me on track all my life." He had a strong GPS.

Aristotle wrote, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act but a habit." The Dalai Lama said, "My religion is kindness." Or, as Thomas Paine wrote, "My country is the world and my religion is to do good." Moral people tend to have good moral habits and a few simple rules, such as do unto others as you would have them do unto you. They are the North Stars for the rest of us. They give us hope as we try to orient on our spinning planet.

The love of your own country hasn't to do with foreign politics, burning flags, or the Maginot Line against immigrants at the border. It has to do with light on a hillside, the fat belly of a local trout, and the smell of new-mown hay.

—B
ILL
H
OLM

The refugee experience of dislocation, cultural bereavement, confusion, and constant change will soon be all of our experience. As the world becomes globalized, we'll all be searching for home. There are two intertwined components to home: people and place. In fact, we can't really know people if we don't share a place with them over time.
Community, communication,
and
communion
all come from the same word, meaning "together" and "next to." Embedded in the word
community
is the concept of a shared place. Ah Internet chat room is not a place. The virtual university that "liberates students from time and space" may perform a service, but it is not a community. An electronic village is no village. Everywhere is nowhere.

William Riley said, "In a world without places there is no responsibility for yesterday and tomorrow." With place comes responsibility—to those who were here before us, to those who are here now, and to those who will come later. At a most basic level we behave better with people and places we will see again and again. We take care of the land, the water, the air, and the animals.

Gary Snyder advised, "Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there." It is a simple thing, to be in a place where good behavior is rewarded and bad is punished. In that sense, all morality, like all politics, is local. The farther we are from home, from our people, the less likely we are to see a strong connection between our own behavior and its consequences. In an avalanche, no snowflake holds itself responsible.

Some of the worst behaviors in America occur in airports and on interstates, places where we move among strangers. These are places where the people who will be hurt by our behavior have no names. In places where we are anonymous, we can do whatever we want. No one will be a witness.

Home is where you know the names of the people you meet. You know who is kind and honest and who lies, betrays, or fools around. Home is where people care if you have a speeding ticket or a fever. It's where people ask about your grandbaby and your daylilies and know your favorite kind of pie. For newcomers, one of the hardest things is simply walking down streets filled with strangers. All of us, wherever we are, search for "an old familiar face."

If you live in one place a long time, you have a history. When you talk with your friends, you don't have to discuss Tom Hanks or Benicio Del Toro; you have real people in common. If you get sick, people will bring you soup and flowers, shovel the snow off your driveway, or go to the pharmacy for you. To move away from home is to move away from life.

In Spanish the concept of home has almost sacred status.
Querencia
refers to an instinct that people and animals have to find a place where they feel safe and at home, a primal need, premammalian even.
Querencia
comes from the verb,
querer,
"to desire." It's the spot in the bullring where the wounded bull goes to collect himself.
Querencia
is a place where one can center and regroup. We all need
querencia
to find ourselves.

When former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was diagnosed with a terminal illness, he left Washington, D.C., to return to his small Texas town. He said, "There people know when you're sick and care when you die." That was
querencia
at its most basic.

The big questions for this decade are, Will we live in real places and have homes, or will we allow ourselves to be defined as consumers in a soulless global landscape? Of course, these aren't either/or questions. We will all be part of both a world culture and a local one, but the amount we participate in each will vary enormously. We have choices.

When Jim and I flew home from Alaska, we could see the northern lights exploding halfway across the bowl of sky over mountains of ice and snow, glacial rivers, and pale tundra. But as we watched out of our small thick window, we were watching alone. All the other passengers had their eyes on a video. It seemed a metaphor for our time, a crowd of people focused on a tired rerun of the news while missing news of the universe.

Refugees often come from places where, at least until the war or tragedy that drove them away, there was a true community, and they fere better in America if they find a new true community. What they need is a hometown. There is a great deal of difference between true and false communities.

In Nebraska, Oakland is a true community and White Clay is a false one. White Clay is a town built near the Pine Ridge Reservation. It has four liquor stores, a post office, a secondhand store, a grocery, a pawnshop, and an auto parts store. Each building is made of cinder blocks and has steel mesh over the windows. Nobody lives in White Clay because they enjoy it; they are there to make money.

Its civic events are shootings, fistfights, stabbings, and beatings. The shopowners keep loaded shotguns behind the counters. White Clay has only carry-out liquor sales, so the Native Americans drink in the town's abandoned houses. There are no festivals in White Clay, no churches, schools, parties, or farmers' markets. White Clay is what will happen to the whole world if we don't stop it.

In contrast, Oakland, Nebraska, is a sleepy little town that is a true community. Many of its children have left, but they come back for holidays and the Swedish festival. My generation of "Oakies" has created many new holidays. There is the Oakland Christmas party in Lincoln, the Ya Shoor bike tour, and summer parties on the Platte. Oakland is filled with characters with character. It is far from any action or centers of power and there is not enough money in town for anyone to bother to come steal. So it remains a simple good place.

Scott Russell Sanders writes, "I cannot have a spiritual center without a geographic one." He contrasts inhabitants to drifters. He speaks of the "malnutrition of the soul," of die "dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness." The words
provincial
and
parochial
have traditionally had negative connotations, but they can also mean the sacredness of one's town.

Place is identity. There is a marvelous Francis Picabia painting at the Art Institute of Chicago called
Four Faces.
The faces are barely outlined. The painting is of the landscape of the islands, mountains, and the trees. His point is that we are landscape internalized. Our souls are etched with the geography of a particular place.

As we become global citizens, we need a home to hold our lives in place. We need to turn off our televisions, go outside, look at the stars, and visit with our neighbors. I think of myself on book tours, month-long marathons of speaking, signing books, giving interviews, and passing through airports and hotel rooms. By the end, I yearn for home. I weep at the smell of my father-in-law's pipe tobacco. I long for the sight of a jonquil or a sycamore. I search for a duck or a goose, even a starling—anything that connects me to home. Or, I think of a Kansan I know, a strong, smart man, who now lives in an East Coast city and works at a high-powered job. He falls asleep at night reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's
Little House on the Prairie.

Paul Gruchow wrote, "The Plains Indians said that everywhere is the center of the world and so it is." American restlessness is overstated. We all come from immigrants, but if we look far enough back in our family trees, we will find a farmer. In
Grass Roots,
Gruchow makes the point that the average settler wasn't in search of a new world to conquer, but of a refuge, "a place with a few cows, a garden, a house of one's own, as far away from trouble as possible."

After a hundred-degree day, the earth is cooling as the sun sinks below the trees west of the city. Women in hijabs and burkas gather in a circle on the grass, their long skirts tucked skillfully beneath them, their faces in shadow. Between mauve and white hibiscus bushes, the grasses are yellow, but the splash of a nearby fountain provides the illusion of water in abundance, of water to squander on beauty. Shouting in Farsi, boys in shorts and T-shirts splash in the pool below the fountain. Their mothers are absorbed in talking to their friends and only occasionally glance their way.

Near the women, a dignified man in traditional clothes and sandals walks alone. I suspect he is the husband of one of the women, perhaps appointed by the other husbands to make sure the wives are not disturbed. Near the fountain, an older man with sad eyes walks with his young wife. They are speaking Arabic, but they don't mesh with the other families. She wears makeup, capri pants, and high heels. They look lonely in this setting, their eyes searching for the face of a friend.