Our culture seems to be caught up in an epidemic of rudeness: Fights on airplanes, belligerent diners raging at stressed-out servers, school-board meeting attendees outraged over mask mandates, bullying bosses, a quiet comment that escalates into a red-faced, clenched-fist exchange of insults. I’ve been lucky so far, just an observer to the incivility, but the questions keep nagging: What to do about this? How to respond?

Research shows that being on the receiving end of incivility, or even witnessing it, amps us up and makes us want to respond in kind. That might give us a momentary sense of satisfaction – repaying rudeness with harsher rudeness so that we’re not bested in this toxic contest – but that’s like tossing a match in a gas can.

A friend here on the hub, Ashwin Budden, recently tipped me to Hidden Brain, a podcast that explores why we do what we do and probes the hard questions that ride the deeper rhythms of our lives. In a recent episode, How Rude!, behavioral scientist Christine Porath speaks about her research that offers an effective way to keep incivility from hijacking our minds and our behavior. It’s not reactive, but rather preventive.

Instead of waiting to experience rude behavior and then figuring out what to do about it, she suggests that we focus on ourselves and engage in whatever activities help us develop a sense of thriving, of moving forward; activities that build hope, vitality, and resilience. The point is to strengthen in us a kind of immune system, she says, so that we’re far less likely to be triggered when others are uncivil and either respond in kind or simply leave the encounter feeling shaken.

So I’m curious: Have you found effective ways to respond to public incivility and perhaps calm the other person? Do you confine your actions to yourself and employ self-calming techniques? Do you just walk away, or does that simply give license for more bad behavior? What’s our responsibility if our goal is weaving a more life-giving culture?

Thanks in advance for your responses.

This is an article I wrote for Spiked online, a British publication I contribute to sometimes. I have been grappling with  origins of our hyper individualist culture and how we might rebuild a sense of common purpose for a while now. My book about parenting culture turned out, quite unexpectedly, to be a book about how we lost the ability to raise children with a sense of being part of to something greater than themselves. As I was thinking it all this though, and trying to imagine what a connected society would look like, I kept casting my mind back to the Frank Capra film, It’s a Wonderful Life. It wasn’t history by any stretch, but there was something about it that rang true. With the book finally out of the way, I decided to spend more time looking at the film and trying to figure out what it is about it that seems to resonate so strongly.

The responses to the article on social media were predictable. There were people who didn’t read it but wanted to express their belief that Die Hard is not a Christmas movie, and there were those who see the small town America of the past as entirely beyond redemption or even consideration. But there were also people who sent me little notes though the magazine because it struck a chord with them. They were the people I wrote it for.

It’s so easy, with the pandemic and our extremes of polarization to lose hope of every being able to do anything. When I’m feeling that way, I watch It’s a Wonderful Life and feel gratitude and hope again. I know it’s not Christmas but if you know the film, maybe this will add another dimension to it.

Nancy

It’s Still a Wonderful Life

It is a strange Christmas, a corona Christmas without guests or parties or carols. And yet there are some things that will remain the same. There’s a Christmas tree decorated with several generations of handmade ornaments. There’s the music: Etta James singing ‘Merry Christmas Baby’, and ‘Winter Wonderland’. And, in the run-up to the big day, we as a family always make a point of sitting down together to watch our favourite Christmas movies: Home Alone, Elf, Die Hard. But of all the films we watch there is one favourite we reserve especially for Christmas Eve: Frank Capra’s 1946 classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.

Each year, we watch George Bailey’s rise, fall and redemption. We scowl at Mr Potter, feel a lump rise in our throats when George finds Zuzu’s petals restored to his pocket. We laugh and cry with relief as the well-wishers crowding George’s living room break into song and a jingling bell confirms that Clarence the angel has finally earned his wings. Truly, it should be the most schmaltzy movie ever made, but somehow it manages to deftly skirt the edges of light and dark, veering from the hokey slapstick of Uncle Billy to the utter despair of wishing – not for death – but to have never been born in the first place. It is unlike anything in contemporary culture. George Bailey is definitely not living his Best Life. He is at the mercy of fate: his father’s death, the run on the bank, and Mr Potter – who never gets his comeuppance. In the end, there are no promises of easy solutions. The building and loan will squeak by, the finial on the bannister will remain broken. George will never build skyscrapers. But it is still a wonderful life because he has friends.

No matter how many times we see it, or how many years have passed since we watched it with our own parents, it never grows stale. If anything, it seems to resonate more deeply as we grow older – especially now when we cannot be close to our friends and families. It is as American as can be, and yet people the world over watch it and understand. Perhaps this is why it is regularly listed as one of the best films ever made. But It’s a Wonderful Life is special to our family for another reason: we live in Bedford Falls.

I don’t mean this in the sense that all Americans live in Bedford Falls. I mean we literally live 15 minutes down the road from Seneca Falls, New York, the most likely model for the Bedford Falls of the movie. We know the bridge over the canal where George contemplates suicide and the lock keeper’s house where he and Clarence dry off under blankets. We know the glass factory referred to in the movie, and we know how long it takes to drive to Elmira where the bank official is eager to return for Christmas. The divided Main Street with its trees and shaded benches looks just as our own did before it was widened to make room for more cars. The Brignalls, Wileys and Pietrocarlos who people our town are the close cousins of the Gowers, Wainwrights and Martinis of Bedford Falls. There are even still a few Mr Potters – everyone knows who they are – pushing their weight around, just as there are still Baileys defying them.

The story the film is based on is somewhat different. In The Greatest Gift, by Philip Van Doren Stern, the protagonist George Pratt stands on a bridge wishing he had never been born. A mysterious stranger grants his wish and allows him to see what the world would be like without him. Though the story is set in Bedford Falls, there is no building and loan, no Mr Potter, no Italian immigrants and no angel. Mary does not remain a spinster, but marries a different man who treats her badly and chases George (who is pretending to be a brush salesman) from the house. In the end he runs back to the bridge and begs the stranger to give him back his life.

As compelling as the story was, Capra, who bought the rights to it in 1945, understood that it would need work to become a film. In order for Bedford Falls to be everyplace, it first needed to be a real place with real people. Seneca Falls in the Finger Lakes region of New York seemed to fit the bill. Perhaps the name reminded Capra of the story, or maybe he felt an affinity for an area where thousands of Italian immigrants like himself chose to settle (Capra’s aunt lived in a neighbouring town). Whatever the reason, the imaginary town of Bedford Falls bears more than a passing resemblance to Seneca Falls. Most poignantly, it was the scene of a tragedy in 1917 when a young Italian labourer, Antonio Varacalli, jumped into the canal after a woman threw herself off the bridge in an attempt to commit suicide. He saved her but was himself drowned. The people of town were so moved by his sacrifice that they renamed the bridge in his honour, and, in an effort reminiscent of the final scene of the film, they came together to contribute enough money to realise Varacalli’s dream of bringing his family over from Italy. Though most of this is conjecture, it is still great fun, and Seneca Falls has made It’s a Wonderful Life its own, with a museum, an annual festival and a ‘George Bailey’ award given to honour an individual for improving the lives of his or her neighbors.

And yet, driving through Seneca Falls and surrounding towns today, it is sometimes hard to imagine the scenes that inspired Capra. Like so many places in America, the downtown areas seldom bustle with anything approaching the energy of the fictional Bedford Falls. There are a few shops, tobacconists, a craft brewery or pizza place, but lots of empty storefronts. The pharmacy with its apothecary jars and soda fountain is long gone, replaced by a tattoo parlor.

There are a few factories left, but most of the old mills have been converted for other purposes, or left to the pigeons. The rolling farmland near Seneca Falls has given way to a great stinking landfill and mountains of trash have replaced orchards and cornfields. There is a new casino, and a prison. Mobile-home parks have sprung up on the edge of town. Many of the once-prized, bricks-and-mortar homes closer to the centre have been bought up by slum lords who rent their ramshackle properties to anyone who qualifies for the federal section-eight housing assistance programme – a more reliable source of rent than their tenants’ meagre wages.

Opioid addiction has left its mark on the region, too. Overdoses are frequent and deadly, and everyone knows of someone who bounces from one rehab centre to another, between brief fits of sobriety. Families, especially those with young children, have become so fragile that the local elementary schools are locked up, not for fear of school shooters, but because of the problem of noncustodial parents slipping their kids out the back door. It is, in a word, ‘Pottersville’.

How did this happen? The economy changed but the local economy did not evolve alongside it and towns found they could no longer shape their own destinies. Rural communities became expendable to the people born in them and to the nation as a whole. In a strange way, It’s a Wonderful Life foreshadows the fate of America’s small towns, and perhaps the fate of the nation, because it shows what happens in a world without Georges.

It’s a Wonderful Life was made when America stood at a crossroads. When ‘the cataclysmic aftermaths of war’, wrote Capra in his autobiography, were breeding ‘gnawing doubts in man’. GIs returned to sweethearts or wives they married in haste and to children who scarcely knew them. Couples lived with their in-laws in fraying Victorian homes, or depression-era bungalows where family members rubbed elbows but felt worlds apart. It was as if all the time-worn obligations and duties that bound people together, that sketched out the parameters of individual lives and gave them meaning, were falling away. Americans were beginning to ask themselves if their sacrifices had been worth it.

Frank Capra understood this disillusionment all too well. Capra joined the army after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and spent most of the war making the ‘Why We Fight’ series of propaganda films. Though lauded – Winston Churchill praised the first, Prelude to War, as the ‘most powerful statement of our cause’ – he returned to Hollywood to find that his reputation had faded. ‘It was disconcerting’, he wrote, ‘to be introduced to an upcoming actress or director and have them ask “Frank Who?”‘. To make matters worse, the Cold War was ramping up to what would eventually become the witch hunts of the McCarthy era. Even by 1945, it was becoming difficult to work with old collaborators, like the screenwriters Dalton Trumbo or Clifford Odets, who were under investigation for their involvement with the Communist Party. Capra was especially sensitive because, in addition to having been born in Italy, his film, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, which took a stand against government corruption, had come under attack from none other than Joseph P Kennedy (the patriarch of the famous Kennedy clan). Kennedy claimed Mr Smith had caused ‘inestimable harm’ to American prestige. Even with his war record, Capra knew he was not immune to investigation.

It was against this backdrop that Capra began work on It’s a Wonderful Life. He seems to have intuited that how Americans would answer the question ‘was it worth it?’ would change the destiny of the country. The worst thing, he thought, would be for them to draw the conclusion that their sacrifices didn’t matter. The film was his answer.

Capra offers up two visions of America’s possible future. In one, George is thwarted at every turn, but comes to realise that in spite of all his troubles, he is the richest man in town because he lives a life connected to others through sacrifice. The other is a world without George. No one is saved because George is no longer there to change the destiny of other people so that they (like his brother Harry, who saves his fellow airmen) can save others. There is no ripple effect. In Pottersville it is every man for himself.

In reality it happened slightly differently. After the war, Americans decided that their sacrifices had not been worth it. They began to resent the obligations and connections that once made life meaningful. Instead they shook the dust of their crummy little towns off their feet. They let the building and loan go to the wall, went to college and never looked back. The ethos of connectedness, of being part of a ‘We’ that animates It’s a Wonderful Life, gave way to an ethos of ‘Me’.

Still, It’s a Wonderful Life gets us in the gut every year. Maybe living for ourselves isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be. Maybe we’re just tired of Pottersville. Or maybe on some level we understand that life may not be perfect, but when we are deeply, hopelessly, inconveniently entwined in the lives of other people, it’s still wonderful.

© Nancy McDermott 2020

We are honored to have Triston B. Black, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and community member of Tsaile, Arizona, share his thoughts in our newsletter and blog for National Mental Health Awareness Month.

Ashinéé’ shiyázhí, or “I’ve missed you my grandchild,” are the first words you hear when your grandparents see you. The love and comfort of our elders give us strength, warmth, and a sense of belonging. Our elderly women hug us and talk about how much we have grown, and our elderly men are glad to catch up with us and see what we have been up to. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect in our tribal communities.

It has taken parents, grandparents, and extended relatives. It was heart aching to hear of loved ones taken from us, but now is the time to take care of our mental health. Now is the time to reconnect with our family, friends, neighbors, and continue to be a good relative to all in our community.

In the Navajo language, our relatives tell us, “Nitsíkees baa áháyą́” which means take care of your mental health. After a good conversation or a chance meeting at the store, we always hear “Ádá’ahwołyą́”, or “Take care of yourself.” Self-care is very important to be a good relative and nurtures our mental well-being. There may be things we are going through or times we need to talk to someone, and it’s always good to hear our relatives out and take the time to listen to them.

Every time I leave home, my grandparents and mother remind me to keep in touch with them and always pray for a safe journey. As Indigenous people, we are always being watched over by the Diyin Dine’é or the Holy People. Everywhere we go, we are constantly protected and blessed with emotional, social, physical, and spiritual strength.

We breathe the sacred breath of life and acknowledge our surrounding environment. For instance, when we go for a walk, we may cross paths with birds, plants, trees, and the natural elements. All these essential beings greet us, sing to us, and weave throughout the landscape. They are happy to see us, just as our elders are happy to see us.

One of the first steps in improving our mental health is taking care of ourselves. I encourage you to take time and breathe. Call or video call an elder, parents, or an extended relative. Take time to remember that our community members are our relatives. You may not know them, but you may make someone’s day by giving them a smile.

These past two years have been tough, but now is the time to heal and continue to be a good relative. Our Indigenous youth prioritize their mental health and build our communities up. What is your call to improve mental health for your community? I say to you, - Ádá’ahwołyą́ - take care of yourself.

Artwork by Joelle Joyner (Meherrin, Cherokee Nation, and Blackfeet) Creative Native Call for Art Category Winner.

As a newly minted, fifth grade social studies teacher, I was determined to use project-based learning, where students work together on a challenge. I gave each team a few “resources” — sticks, straw and twine — and asked them to invent something to carry three rocks from one side of the room to the other without the rocks touching the ground.

Children leapt from their desks to get to work building and testing. They cheered each small success and groaned with each failure. But in one group, students were arguing and getting impatient as the deadline neared.

Jamie, a student who struggled academically and rarely spoke in class, was quietly explaining his idea, but his teammates brushed him off and told him it wouldn’t work. He kept at it, tying three pieces of twine to a stick and then tying a rock to each dangling end. As I walked over, he held it up slowly, anticipating the pushback, which followed. The others all looked at me. “It doesn’t work,” one student said. “Right, Ms. Kraft?”

“Does it use only the materials you were given? Does it transport three rocks across the room without touching the floor?”

“Yes!” they shouted in unison. 

“Jamie,” I responded. “It’s brilliant. It’s a solution I hadn’t even dreamed of when I created the challenge.”

The group cheered their hero and followed him back and forth across the room several times as he proudly walked with his creation in hand and then passed it to others to share the success. His group members bragged about him to the rest of the class and then to the rest of the grade at the bustling lunch tables. This student who didn’t see himself as smart and whom others discounted, was seen in a new light by others and even himself.

Unfortunately, humans, even teachers, can tend to see people in terms of their deficits and define them in terms of their needs. Once the sorting happens, we may lose sight of each child’s unique gifts and fail to see strengths and successes.

Tech and social entrepreneur Trabian Shorters points out that we do this with whole groups of people and entire communities. We label them by their problems, using terms like at risk, impoverished, homeless, or a school-to-prison pipeline. We think we are serving people by seeing their needs. But doing that, says Shorters, makes us, and them, blind to their own power and aspirations.

He suggests an alternative way of seeing, a framework he calls Asset Framing, and explains in a recent On Being with Krista Tippett interview. You look for the assets and aspirations of a community, its value, instead of the places where it may be broken. Then, you can work to unlock, or unblock, the aspiration. The approach, says Tippett, “is in and of itself dignifying and renewing.” Aspiring communities are made up of aspiring people. So if we learn to see the spirit in a community, we see the spirit in its people, too.

Shorters says when people learn to asset-frame, they engage more people, have higher impact, make people more willing to work on systems change, and raise more money. Since 2013, communities trained by Shorters’s BMe Community have raised about $300 million.

Jamie’s aspiration was to be an engineer. I don’t know if that early dream became a reality, but I expect his moment of being seen as an inventor that day in our classroom, and not as a struggling learner, was the start of writing a new story based on his strengths. Who wouldn’t want that for ourselves and our communities?

Here are some of the ways my mother taught me to live, love and lead during a crisis.

The other day I was on a daily check-in call with my mother, reminding her to stay in as much as possible and a little parenting my parent.  The conversation shifted and I began to complain about being locked in my condo in DC alone, how I had gone through everything in my Netflix queue and how I was in desperate need of a visit to a barber.

My mom, who often reminds me that our roles have not shifted, she is indeed my parent, and that I’ve not always had a privileged life, then went on to say, “Well, son, I’ll tell you, life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” – which is a line from the Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son.” She went on to remind me of my childhood and some stories of hers and how life for some has and will always be a crisis and how you learn to manage.

Here are some of the ways she taught me to live, love and lead during a crisis.

1. Sharing & Caring: We hear stories of people stockpiling tissue and paper towels.  My mother reminded me that she and her sisters would often share food stamps and food from already near bare freezers and pantries.  She reminded me that she often worried how she and my siblings would eat, but those acts of kindness and solidarity made her feel as if she’d accomplished something and it gave her value in very trying times.

2. Perspective: As a kid my mother would remind us that, even though we had some hardships, it was indeed worse for other people. I grew up in Saginaw, MI and experienced food insecurities, evictions and much more, but there were still those amongst us with bigger problems. She reminded me that others are experiencing COVID-19 different from me and I should be thankful for the luxuries that I have, instead of worrying about those I don’t have.

3. Find the Lesson: I was reminded that for every great finish line crossed, there was a race that had to be run. There are societal, individual and personal lessons that we must all grapple with during this time. Spend some time going inward, finding opportunity to grow and come out better because of this time.  Rainbows only come after rainfall.

4. Faith: As a kid growing up you could often find me in church throughout the week. It was a way of life and a sense of security in a life that often felt insecure.  Although I rarely participate in organized religion as an adult, I firmly believe in a higher power as the guiding force in my life and the lives of others. Whatever your faith or non-faith, spending time quietly connecting with god or the universe can ground you at a time when life’s foundation feels rocked by the force of an earthquake.

5. Family: My childhood, although marred with crisis, was filled with much love and family.  I don’t remember a time during my childhood that wasn’t filled with Sunday dinners spent with aunts, uncles, cousins and friends who became family. Family was how we made it through. We pooled resources, shared emotional strength and showered love abundantly. Although physical distance is the best way to stop the spread of COVID-19, phones and videocalls allow us to strengthen the relationships that our busy and selfish lives allowed to wane.

Crisis affects each of us differently. There are tons of stories of human kindness and selflessness, but also those of selfishness.  We need to decide how we want to come out on the other side of COVID-19. Over the next few weeks, I will find ways to share and care, think about the perspectives and plights of others, search for lessons of growth, strengthen relationships with family and friends, and dig deeper into my faith.

We will all come out of this differently and changed. Let’s figure out how we can come out on the other side of COVID-19 better because of it.

In a few months, I get to marry my best friend, Johnny. To prepare for our marriage, we’re going through pre-marital counseling, and so far it has been fantastic. But along with the excitement, I have also had to confront a monster that is always on the hunt to taint the relationships in my life: my own self-centeredness.

One part of our counseling experience includes reading “The Meaning of Marriage” by Tim Keller, which looks at marriage from a Christian perspective. Keller writes that what once was a public institution for the common good to create character and community, marriage is now seen as a way to reach personal life goals and to fulfill one’s own emotional, sexual and spiritual desires. In essence, “Marriage used to be about us, but now it is about me.”

Keller argues that the real purpose of marriage is to express and live God’s love for us through a relationship. It is about giving, not receiving – an idea that our culture-of-self would instinctively find oppressive and limiting. Keller argues and Weave’s Relationalist Manifesto echoes: “Joy is found on the far side of sacrificial service. It is found in giving yourself away.”

“Some will ask, ‘If I put the happiness of my spouse ahead of my own needs – then what do I get out of it?’ The answer is – happiness,” Keller writes. ”Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit – that is, when the relationships appear to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back – then we ‘cut our losses’ and drop the relationship…  and so the very idea of a ‘covenant’ is disappearing in our culture.”

As I ask myself, “Am I really selfish in my relationship with Johnny?” my instinct shouts, “No, I’m a great partner and I love to serve him above myself.” But I realize both my question and answer are ironic, as they truly put me into the spotlight instead of Johnny. Deep down, I have had to confront the uncomfortable truth that unfortunately, I’m not always the best partner and the ugliness of self-centeredness is in me, too. From getting snappy when things don’t go my way or not being considerate of his needs, I‘m growing more aware of patterns in my attitudes and actions that I would justify as “what I deserve,” but which are, honestly, just a facade masking my ego.

As I wrestle with the thoughts of “Well, what about my needs?” versus letting go of my preferences for the sake of another, I’m reminded of a quote by Rick Warren. It captures the kind of humility I admire in Weavers who live lives of self-sacrificial service: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself or more of yourself – but thinking of yourself less.”

I suspect humility is the secret sauce required for a successful marriage, and all other relationships. A humility to recognize my shortcomings and share them with Johnny. A humility to acknowledge how often my ego gets in the way of seeing him and others fully. And a humility to accept that true joy isn’t found in what I do or what I want – but it’s in giving myself away.

I’d love to hear your stories or advice of what you’ve learned about yourself and life through your own journeys of self-examination and humility. I value the wisdom and hard-won lessons of this community. I’m glad to have companions on the path of weaving.