Good Chemistry by Julie Holland

Author:Julie Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Connection with the Community

A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way, and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbor.

—CARL JUNG

Not long ago, after an early yoga class, I went to breakfast at my local diner, seventy miles north of New York City in the Harlem Valley, a patch of rolling hills and farms between the Hudson River and the Connecticut state line. In the parking lot, I saw a car with a #NotMyPresident bumper sticker. There were two dogs in the back seat, and one of the waitresses was sitting in front. It made me like her more, knowing we shared an opinion on the biggest political controversy of the day. Here in the country, closer to the heartland than to the city where Jeremy and I met, I often feel like I’m in the minority (although this area is becoming more of a mix of red and blue, which makes it purple, my favorite color as a kid).

After breakfast, I went to Hannaford to pick up a few groceries with Jeremy, and I chatted amiably with the older gentleman in line behind me—not about anything in particular, just the weather or what was on the menu for dinner. I can’t remember what he said or how I replied, just that he seemed like a kind man with pale blue eyes and a sincere smile. As we were leaving, Jeremy asked if I’d noticed his faded NRA cap. I was glad that I hadn’t because it might have made me miss out on a nice moment of connection.

We live side by side with the people who watch Fox News and wear the hats. They’re at the diner, behind me in line. They’re my townsfolk. They’re fellow Americans. They’re us. Really, there is no “them.” When I was younger, I thought that “divide and conquer” meant that if we split up the grocery list, we’d be done shopping sooner. Now I know it’s about maintaining power, which means we have to resist our natural impulse to categorize. If you were to divide us by some other measure—our favorite Beatle, or whether we put ketchup on our egg sandwiches—it wouldn’t be “us vs. them” anymore, conservatives vs. progressives. As Dr. Brené Brown, University of Houston professor of social work, says: “It’s harder to hate up close.”

Let’s now look at our connection with our community and how we can strengthen it. Connecting at this level is different from the connections we’ve looked at and tried before, with ourselves, the people we love, and our children. We can’t count on the people we meet on the street in the same way, or maybe there’s no room in our alienated society for the kind of collective living that’s in our DNA. But despite this distance, we are still drawn to places where we

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