escaping the prison of our individuality

 what ties can bind?

how can we feel ourselves as community?

how can we bind together?

what is the glue that can bind us together?

how can we find commonality despite our differences?

as a defining reality, 

how can we share the same language of defining story?

now we can choose the source of our information,

the source of our news, by what feels right to us

and reinforces our take on it all,

we are all so different

in what we want to eat,

in what we want to read,

in how we want to experience the world,

it used to be that the news came to us

in shared newspaper and television,

so that we knew what was happening

and a range of possible actions to deal with it,

stories were left out, nuances denied,

but our solution to that problem fragments us,

so many voices come at the collective

that babble replaces shared truth,

and we don’t know which is the prophet from God

and which is the prophet from the Devil,

in America for hundreds of years,

The Bible gave us commonality of story, of parable,

so that we could communicate with a shorthand of allusion.,

The Odyssey performed a similar function,

defining value, worth, gender identity,

what would Moses do? Jesus do? Odysseus or Penelope do?

the common experience of Shakespeare much the same,

now we seek to be free from anything that can channel us

into wrong-headed, parochial systemic thought,

the canon can stultify,

yet its absence and the plethora of choice

makes it hard to share experience and revelation,

I can imagine commonality still pulling us together,

but the steps away from the communal stories

make me fear that the way forward will become even harder,

now we do not share even the same news, the same truths,

so that masks are logical necessities to deal with Covid 19

or tyrannical restrictions on God-given freedom,

is science a liberal conspiracy

or a lens through which hard truth reveals itself?

if we can’t agree on what the news is,

or on what defining stories should be studied in middle school,

our diversities stand out over our commonalities,

how can we escape the prison of our individuality

and gambol in the open air

of what makes us one species?

by Henry H. Walker

April 12, ‘21