Layered Reality

Layered Reality   —by Jinny Batterson

Sometimes, despite fairly consistent efforts to broaden my circle of friends and acquaintances, it seems as if I’m stuck in an ever-shrinking bubble, quarantined in my own little “liberal-urban-retiree” silo. Recently I had a chance to spend a week with our out-of-town grandchildren, exploring a couple of stunning U.S. national parks via outdoor hikes. My guess is that our son and daughter-in-law had carefully coached the kids to humor grandma and grandpa by not overusing their “screens.” We watched a fair number of breakfast-time morning cartoons, but mostly we wandered outside, free from earbuds, television, or other screens. Cell phone coverage was minimal or nonexistent.

Much of our political and cultural life these days, including mine when not hiking with the grandkids, gets mediated by screens. Screen life can often seem tasteless, colorless, instantaneous, disconnected. I realize I’m getting old and slow, but I doubt this is the only cause for our disconnectedness.

I remember a story my rural sister told me. Typically apolitical, Sal had gotten sufficiently exercised in our recent hyper-charged society that she decided to become more politically active. In 2018, she campaigned for a candidate for U.S. congress in the Maryland district where she lives. She and I live in mirrored political entities—both North Carolina, where I live, and Maryland, where Sal resides, are “poster child states” for extreme political gerrymandering. I live in one of a few districts carved out to the benefit of NC’s minority party (in this case, the Democrats). Sal lives in the one district in Maryland that has been allocated to its minority party (in this case, the Republicans). Though our NC polling sites during early voting and on election day fairly consistently have longish lines, the precinct where Sal stood with her candidate’s literature wasn’t busy. Dribbles of voters came by the area where campaigners were allowed, leaving lots of down time. My sister is nothing if not gregarious, so before long she was talking with the two campaigners for the majority party candidate. Carefully sidestepping the merits of their respective candidates, Sal probed for possible common ground. Pretty soon, the three of them were discussing the uncertainty of sale prices for soybeans; the availability of rental drones for quicker, more thorough analysis of field conditions; the best area bulls for improving dairy herds; the impact of changes in agricultural regulations on small-scale farmers. Although there were certainly political opinions where the three of them likely disagreed, they found a good many areas where their interests overlapped and they could be both civil and informative. Their reality was layered with interspersed agreement and disagreement.

Last year about this time, I was in an area of rural France where human habitation goes back hundreds of thousands of years. I got a tour of an archeological site with over a dozen layers of excavation, ranging from about 40,000 to about 15,000 years ago. Now inactive, the site had been carefully dug during a human generation or so, some layers yielding little in the way of artifacts or information, others rich with both. I believe we need to remember that our social and political realities are rarely either/or, much more often layered with both conflict and agreement. Likewise, we are both independent and interdependent.  Please let’s take a bit more effort toward excavating beyond the tweets and the sound bites—our neighbors may be more layered than we know.