Stakes

Yesterday on the flight home, I was reading True Enough by Farhad Manjoo. The book's basic argument is that the proliferation of information available on the internet has actually served to divorce people from "truth" more than ever before. All media has become niche markets (selective exposure), and even when we do see the same thing, there is no consensus on what actually happened , that even our senses conform to our preconceived notions (selective processing). I sort of think the information age has just made it easier to see the fracturing of culture that was already there, but he does make some good points about how people are more secure in their sometimes nutty views when they can find a community of like-minded individuals, and that is now accessible to anyone able to spend a few minutes on google. This divorced-from-reality reality is part of why the Swift Boat Veterans were so successful, why 1/3rd of Americans believe the US government was somehow involved in 9-11, why we're still trying to convince the heartland that Barack Obama is not a Kenyon-Born Muslim homosexual.

This was a bummer, so I put the book down and turned on my iPod. I sat back and relaxed, and then the plane dropped.

It was less than two seconds, but it was enough time to scare the Hell out of everyone aboard. We locked eyes and chuckled away the fear. The woman in front of me leaned her head on the shoulder of her seatmate, a man she had never met.

If our plane had plummeted into the New Jersey Pine Barrens, there would be a million explanations by just as many talking heads on television. The CEO of Delta would have to answer questions about the training of the pilot, the decision to fly in slightly inclement weather, the age and condition of the plane (my armrest was broken, a sure sign of engineering quality). A conspiracy theory that oil companies caused the crash to encourage people to drive more would gain legs in the paranoid fringes. The blackbox recording would be played and interpreted in as many ways it takes to make any interpretation suspicious and irrelevant.

But 20,000 feet in the air, there were no questions. When the stakes are raised, when its clear that the only thing that matters is to be alive or dead, the schism is healed. We were falling and we were together.

How do we unite when the stakes aren't so clear?