SOCIAL

Thank goodness for the new world of social media. How did we get by for so long without knowing that every issue boils down to viewpoints of a singular dimension? It seems more and more that opinions can be summed up in a status update of a few words or, more likely, in a picture or story from afar that is shared and spread and in which everything is taken completely out of context or born of an unyielding hatred. From behind our screens, big and small, we can so easily direct blame and deny the humanity of others and spread vitriol and say, without a doubt, this and only this is who I am. Should not our thoughts and opinions have more value to us than that? Can we ever again take time to think through a thing, to mull a little bit, to consider and converse and ask good questions, to see perspectives of which we were not aware?

These thoughts have been troubling me for some time, especially as the most recent election wrapped up and more so in the wake of the school shootings in Connecticut, each a situation in which claims to a side were so easily staked and others so readily dismissed. Many times I have been hampered in my ability to post here because my mind is turning over such things, unsure of what it is I want to say or if even I should be saying anything at all. I do not mean to imply that I do not feel strongly about certain issues and problems we face as a gathering of human beings. I absolutely do, though I more often than not keep them to myself. It is a weakness, I confess. And, certainly I have my own penchant sometimes for bumper sticker sorts of philosophies. Do we not mostly prefer things delivered neatly in small and uncomplicated packages, around which we can more easily wrap our minds? But, when I see what we can unleash upon one another with hastily typed words, I cannot help but wonder if we are not capable of a more civil and thoughtful discourse. Should not such a thing be among the highest ideals of a self-governing people?

These same thoughts have been further ground down in my mind of late as I finished my first book of this new year, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior. If there is one thing I believe Kingsolver does better than any other writer I have read, it is the way she frames the insurmountable complexities of an issue within a compelling, believable story about people and places and things we can all easily imagine. Her novels lay out for us a pathway through a dialogue and show us that the water can be awfully muddy when it comes to most things. Through characters we recognize and with whom we can identify, she allows us to ask questions that maybe we had not thought of before and she gives us room, especially, to listen.

This her latest novel is a story of a rural community confronting a phenomenon of nature unseen before in its midst and that is at once both inordinately beautiful and a marker of something altogether wrong in the world. Its occurrence draws outsiders and opinions of every kind. Kingsolver's book is dead solid in its presentation of the many and subtle layers that thread themselves through the dichotomies that exist between the rural and the urban. But, what it really comes down to and what she reminds me of over and over again is that nearly everything we confront as a society must eventually be viewed through the lens of class. We have a difficult time talking about it in direct terms, but class shapes more than anything else, I believe, our way of seeing the world.

There are a lot of strongly felt opinions about the central question in this book, and we see many of them everyday written and voiced in terms far too uncomplicated for a problem of such enormity. But, like good fiction should, Kingsolver's novel asks us to work a little harder to see into the mass of tangled answers, to at least arrive at our own conclusions with empathy and understanding and a bit of sweat on our brow, perhaps, from thinking them through. We may not always be able to find the answers, but we can at least acknowledge the shared humanity between ourselves and other people while we are at it.