Something I like to think about is what I call "shared experience" and how it is important to interpersonal relationships. When you meet someone, you exchange information--some given away by your appearance, some by the surroundings of the encounter, but mostly through verbal communication. What do you do for a living, how many siblings do you have. That sort of thing. Then each participant in the conversation takes that information, and filters it through their own experience.
"Oh, you work at Burger King? Why, I once worked at a McDonalds!" Here we have a shared experience, but several times removed. Different restaurant chains, probably different cities, definitely different times, but now the two of you have a bond, a shared experience.
If someone sees you reading a book they have also read, the urge is to tell you that. Strangers, with nothing in common with you besides being in the same place at this exact moment, and having read the same book, can barely contain themselves from announcing that shared experience.
Or movies, as a final example before I move on. To people my age and a bit older, to find out that someone has, say, never seen the original Star Wars can almost create a sense of anxiety. "How can I relate, how can I communicate, with this person who doesn't share this experience that was seminal in my own life?" It isn't important that two people saw the exact same screening of the film, sitting next to each other. I may have seen it in the theater, and you may have seen it on VHS or DVD, but we need that shared experience if, for example, one of us wants to make a reference to "the Dark Side" or "the Force".
Because, you see, it is the Dark Side I really wanted to talk about.
When people really want to know each other better, eventually a subject of discussion will be "Where were you, what were you doing, HOW DID YOU EXPERIENCE this particular tragedy, an experience we must share because of its scope, tell me the details of how you learned of it, reacted to it, were changed by it."
These days, I suppose, the best example is the 9-11 attacks. But other examples include the Kennedy assasinations or Martin Luther King's assassination (for people older than me) or the first space shuttle explosion, or Kurt Cobain's suicide. (I apologize for an obvious American bias in my tragedy listing...I'd include the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it isn't really a tragedy, is it...oh heck I included it anyway).
The shared tragedy on my mind recently though, is the assassination of John Lennon--25 years ago December 8th.
I was seven weeks shy of my eighth birthday, and this memory is one of my earliest clear recollections. I knew of the Beatles. I loved their music! But, before then, it hadn't mattered to me that this person wrote "Yellow Submarine" and "Octopus' Garden" while "Puff the Magic Dragon" was written by someone else entirely. It was all music.
But I remember grappling with the news that there had been a terrible, terrible tragedy. My father, who must have been having a very hard time himself, having to explain to me the facts of death--which I had only experienced with a pet cat and a couple hamsters.
I remember listening to the radio, that day and for several days afterward. I remember the choked up dee-jay's voice. First, having to repeat the news over and over, then later, between Beatles and Lennon songs, inserting a bit of shared experience; ""Don't Pass Me By" has always been a favorite of mine," he might have said, "because I was late for a date once due to an auto accident." Then the song would start.
After those days I got very, very into the Beatles. When I was fourteen, before I'd learned of punk and "alternative", etc. I honestly felt and could debate well, that all the good songs had already been written, and the best songs had been written by the Beatles. I was not lamenting; at the time I didn't need anything more.
I recall a trip with the school band some years later. Discovering that, unbeknownst to me, my classmates also shared the experience of listening to and loving the Beatles. We sang the songs, all of, as the bus rolled. When one finished, someone would immediately launch into another, to be joined by the rest of us. We hit a snag with "Get Back". Only one other guy, someone I had known for years as a classmate, but never been close friends with, only he and I were certain that there were two verses before the chorus--and we connected on that shared experience of being so familiar with the song.
Eventually I moved away from home to go to college. I had picked a school with perhaps the most liberal reputation in the nation, The Evergreen State College in Washington state. Finally I would be surrounded with people who shared my experience and values: that "Yes" WAS the answer, goddamnit, that "Love" was really all you needed, and that we would, as one, gently request that "Peace" be given a fighting chance.
Of course, it did not turn out exactly like that. Even in this place where I'd hoped to find unity, there was bickering, infighting, and petty drama. Militant feminists, rabid vegetarians, eco-warriors and mislabeled anarchists. The goal was simple, I felt, the message clear, and these people, somehow, were missing that bigger picture.
Rodney King had asked, hoping to quell the riots in retaliation of the acquittal of his attackers "Why can't we all get along?" And instead of treating this for what it was--not niaevity, but honest existential angst over something deeply troubling to anyone with a miligram of humanity--it became a national joke. To this day my stomach is turned. People, probably not knowing it's genesis, say the phrase and think it funny. Well, it isn't. It isn't funny that we can't get along.
And, so it comes to pass, 25 years since the death of a man who could put into words and music what so many felt and thought. And it seems we don't get along any better. I wasn't sure how I was going to conclude this essay. I wanted to share some of my experiences, hoping that they might resonate with others. I wanted to remind people that joy, love, cooperation, peace--these aren't silly daydreams, but viable goals worth making an effort towards. I wanted to say all that and more. But I don't, or shouldn't need to. It's been said.
All we are saying is give peace a chance.