Wanting to be somebody may not be the strongest of all urges, but it’s up there. Despite being awfully unspecific, it’s universally understood. Either somebody or nobody, that’s the choice. A false choice, but a widely accepted one.
Being awfully unspecific, somebody status means different things to different people. Achievement. Popularity. Wealth. Influence. Whatever gets you noticed, admired, remembered. It can be earned. Or finagled. It can inspire greatness. Or manufacture misery.
The best somebodies among us lift others while they rise. The worst knock others down to build themselves up.
My heart ached and tears flowed last week at the news of a beautiful, bright-eyed 10-year-old Indiana boy killing himself after enduring prolonged bullying at school. His tormentors manufactured misery, repeatedly knocking little Sammy Teusch down in the empty hope that brutality might make them appear bigger and stronger. They must have been thinking that somebody status is a zero-sum game. For one to be somebody, another must be a nobody. Their thinking produced tragic results.
Try as I might, I could not manage to entirely divert my gaze from another tragedy, this of Shakespearean proportions. An emotionally disfigured man, obsessed with his own grandeur, tortured by the thought that another could be as great, sitting in a New York City courtroom, day after day, made to listen to eyewitness accounts of how he used and abused others for his own gratification and to gain notoriety and power. His accusers, day after day, made to recount how they debased themselves, maybe in hopes of earning his approval, perhaps out of fear of reprisal.
Next thing I knew, a man who’d been unknown to me, a man who kicks a ball for a living, started trending as they say. Harrison Butker’s 15 minutes of fame came not after kicking a game-winning field goal but rather in the aftermath of a commencement speech urging men to fight against “cultural emasculation” and imploring women to accept the role of homemaker as their destiny. I share an accident of birth in common with Harrison Butker, for I am male, but do not feel and never have felt emasculated, culturally or otherwise. I am male, but that does not define my totality and does not make me the same as Harrison Butker and does not give me the right to assign anyone a destiny.
Around this same time, within a matter of days, I had two conversations, one with a teacher, another with a parent, both wishing children could somehow be freed from the clutches of cell phones. Kids (and adults, too) think they’re socializing but are in truth being socialized, hooked on doomscrolling, growing ever more anxious, no match for the algorithms that feed their addiction. Craving attention and affirmation, many innocents enter toxic surroundings, leaving themselves vulnerable to online bullying. Bullies pounce, savaging their victims, and the algorithms work their dismal magic, amplifying cruelty, furnishing the bullies views and clicks and likes and shares and follows that create the illusion of importance. Now this is cultural emasculation.
Finally and not coincidentally, my thoughts return to a movie I saw some weeks ago, telling the story of Francesca Cabrini, an Italian immigrant who came to this country in 1889, as caring and giving as she was ambitious and enterprising. She encountered multitudes who were down on their luck. She proved able to lift them not because she was somebody and they were nobodies, but rather because she did not regard them as lowly, did not treat them as if they were beneath her. The mere memory of her is an inspiration.
Somebody or nobody, that’s the choice, an awfully unspecific yet horribly limiting choice. A false choice that distracts us from discovering and cultivating our own individuality and coming to terms with our uniqueness, the essence of our humanity.
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