The extent of this interconnection is new. Before reliance on social media and mass media, a person’s outlook was much more parochial. True, news of something happening across the world might have reached our grandparents, but local concerns—political and personal—flooded their conscious lives. To offset this pendulum swing toward a larger, global—and at times troubling—interconnectedness, we need to cultivate our own sense of personal connection. We need to turn inward and appreciate moments of unexpected union, often deep in our own experience.

Each of us has such moments tucked away in our brains and hearts, ready to comfort us if we allow ourselves the dream-like power to summon them up. I don’t mean to imply that we should ignore troubling events, ignore hate crimes, ignore terrorism. For us to do the good we can in this world, we need to put those events in perspective. We need to transcend the day-to-day news cycle coverage and recall those instances of personal connection.

To keep my perspective, I find myself thinking of decades ago when I was in college, and I served as a rent-a-cop at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. I made an unlikely para-military figure. Of the 25 of us security guards, virtually all sported short hair. Our grizzled captain had a flat top and muscles bulging through his uniform. Several guards had to be dissuaded from bringing personal firearms to work. In contrast, my hair then tumbled to my shoulders under my beige cap, and I didn’t even want to carry the baton allotted to me. (What would I use it for? I was more concerned it would be used against me.)

Ninety minutes before every football game we assembled, received our marching orders from the captain, and disbursed. I was always assigned outside the perimeter of the chain fence surrounding the Coliseum. Then the hordes would descend to see USC or the Rams play. Like those time-lapse films of tides, every week was the same: the fans trickled in, built to a crescendo, and ebbed just before game time—the jostling crowd noise moving from the perimeter to a hushed roar inside the Coliseum.

Once when the horde was at its peak, six high school kids decided to taunt me. They surrounded me and asked, “Whatcha gonna do if we jump the fence?” Now, this was not much of a threat. The fence was high, and my fellow security guards—spaced within sight left and right—would see six guys clambering up a chain link fence. “Gonna use your club?” said a tall, lanky kid with a sky-high afro. He lunged at me. I stepped back.

So here I was, this skinny white kid—maybe 20 years old—wearing clothes of authority, surrounded by six black kids threatening to humiliate me. Impulsively I said, “You want this?” I pulled the club out of its belt loop and held it out to the lanky guy. He snatched it away and held it aloft. He strutted off, swaying back and forth, the others in his wake. “Hippy cop,” someone muttered. They wandered off.

That went well, I thought. Then I thought, what will I say at the end of the shift when Captain Grizzly asks for my baton?

When you’re a security guard you have plenty of idle time on your hands. I sifted through explanations for a disappearing baton and settled on this: “It must have fallen out when I was in the bathroom.” Dubious—but better than telling the captain I gave it to a bunch of high school kids.

The hushed roar told me game time was near, when one of the kids approached. He was the smallest of the bunch, his hands now behind his back. When he got close to me, he stopped and looked me in the eye. “You need this?” he asked, swinging the baton toward me like a relay runner. “Thanks,” I said, taking it and pushing it back into its loop.

“Why you wanna be a renta pig anyway?” he asked.

I shrugged. I told him I got to watch the fourth quarter from the sidelines.

A couple weeks later another incident occurred. The game was starting. A muffled roar emanated from the Coliseum, and people here and there hastened past. In front of me inside the perimeter, a white man in an official-looking vest pulled open the gate and shoved a black kid out. He looked to be 14 at most. His hands on the fence, the kid pleaded with the vest man, but he turned on his heels, oblivious. “What happened?” I called out to the kid. He came over, wiping tears from his eyes. He’d gone to get food. He’d caused a commotion somehow and got himself kicked out. His brother and father were inside.

His story was sketchy, but his tears were real. No teenage boy wants to cry.

“You want to get back in?”

He nodded his head yes.

I grabbed his arm and marched him toward the main gate. The crowd had thinned by this point and the ticket takers looked at me curiously. “Caught this guy trying to sneak in,” I said. “I’m taking him up to the captain.”

The ticket takers parted, and we marched on through. I kept up the hold on the kid’s arm until we rounded a corner. Then I let go. Apparently my cop routine had been convincing to the kid, since he looked up at me and said, “What?” He seemed uncertain of the next move.

“Go see the game!” I said.

A grin spread across his face. “Thanks,” he said and loped off.

In those days I was also a tutor. Twice a week I tutored a second grader—Steve Johnson—as part of a program through USC. For the first several sessions, Steve and I met at a community center, but other kids running around distracted us. Finally he said, “Why don’t we go over to my house?” His house turned out to be just down the street. That was okay with the center, and so I started tutoring Steve at home, always on his porch.

I gradually came to know the whole family. He had five brothers and sisters. His mother gracefully mixed patience and severity. His father gruffly cut a path in and out of the house, muttering a greeting and vanishing. Toward Thanksgiving one evening, he parked his rumbling automobile, cut the engine, slammed the car door, and climbed the steps to the front door. Abruptly he stopped and sized me up me, seemingly for the first time. “When you’re done with Steve, I wanna invite you inside.”

Twenty minutes later, Steve closed his reading and I knocked on the door. His father opened it and beckoned me to come in and sit on the couch.

“You want a drink?” Behind him, Steve was shaking his head. It was 4:30, early for me. But it seemed to be some sort of ritual the way Steve’s father held me in his gaze.

“Sure,” I said, with a bluster that rang hollow. “Thank you.”

He poured me a stiff whiskey and handed me the glass. Steve still was shaking his head, silently disapproving of his father’s early happy hour, a regular occurrence I would later learn. I raised the glass, looked him in the eye, felt the whiskey burn down my gullet and blinked back mist from my eyes.

“I been watching how you been helping Stevie,” his father said. “And I just want you to know I appreciate it.” The last sunlight was pouring in, casting the room in burnt umber. He rubbed his hand over the stubble on his jaw. “I never thought I’d have a white person in my house,” he said, adding, “You’re always welcome.” He held out his hand, and I shook it.

The beauty of that handshake still comforts me over the years. Partly it comforts me that such a handshake is not that unusual today. But back four decades ago it bridged a profound gap between races. And today in recollection it resonates louder than gunshots in Orlando or Dallas. Such memories link in a beguiling way to other thoughts lodged in my brain. But that ability to make patterns is in each of us. And calling up moments of grace and union allows us to transcend the despair of being perhaps at times too connected.

The post How the Memory of a Handshake Helps Put Tragedy in Perspective appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Such a scene is familiar to Egyptians. And so was the bad news. This was the third instance of aviation disaster for Egypt in the past year, after the October 2015 explosion that brought down the Russian Metrojet leaving the Sinai and the hijacking of an EgyptAir flight in March.

In the café, we turned to the now familiar task of cataloguing this event: Terrorism? Conspiracy? Accident? Egyptians are known for being quite sociable, and the café soon turned into a forum of different people trying to analyze the situation. A 26-year-old waiter bellowed that the “Muslim Brotherhood” was probably behind this, a sentiment that would be loudly expressed by many anti-MB Egyptians in the days after. Another voice replied that the government probably planned this, and soon the two men were arguing.

Quickly, the headlines turned.

“Egyptian Flight MS804 Crashes and Burns.” This was no downturn to Cyprus, as was the fate of the hijacked flight. We started browsing Facebook pages, trying to figure out if anyone we know had been affected. I spent the rest of the day looking down at my news feed.

On the alumni Facebook group for my school, the American University of Cairo, I learned that two alums were on board the flight: Ahmed Helal and Ghassan Abu Laban. My heart wrenched at two particular stories, one of them Laban’s. He was on board the doomed flight with both his parents and his wife Reem; the couple left behind two daughters. Since France is a popular cancer treatment destination for many Egyptians, there was a 30-year-old mother along with her husband on the doomed flight. They had sold most of their belongings, as mentioned by popular local Egyptian publication Youm7, to carry out an operation for the wife. In the end, they left behind three children.

These were only a few of the human stories that were bellowing on Egyptian social media, and many more have since been unveiled.

Consequently, apart from attending the public memorial services for the victims, there were many efforts by the locals to try and help their families, which included starting a fund for the children whose parents were deceased on the doomed flight.

However later on, EgyptAir posted its own message asking people to leave the families in peace: “The families of the victims of flight MS804 appreciate the efforts of the people trying to help them, but they would like to keep the matter private and they are not looking for financial assistance and would like to mourn their loved ones in peace.”

The next day, I was on the phone with one of my close friends from university, whose voice sounded hoarse. She told me the story of her childhood friend who was one of the flight attendants on board. A little while later, I received an unrelated group message exclaiming, “Don’t call her! Or do anything yet.” Scrolling up, I saw that a family member of an old friend was the co-pilot aboard the flight.

At the university, the conversation was both about causes and reactions. Western news agencies kept invoking “terrorism” even though no one yet knew what had brought the plane down. This soon became a topic. So did fears about other flights.

But after the first few days, the concerns about safety turned to worries about the effect the crash would have on Egypt’s already struggling economy and tourism industry. Hashtags such as #supportEgyptAir, ‪#IsupportEgyptAir,‬‬‬‬ and #PrayforMS804 were soon spreading online to counteract the castigation of our national airline. The international criticism felt unfair—I have traveled many times on EgyptAir and received excellent service.‬

More recently, I was back in the café and people were still worried about reasons for the tragedy. But around Cairo, you see more signs of people mourning those who perished on the flight. Given that mourning in Egypt is a public affair, Muslims and Christians alike were carrying out memorial services for the victims all over Egypt.

People are saying the “Salat Gha’eb” or “prayer of the absentee.” According to my Islamic faith, these people died as martyrs, since they were considered to have been killed protecting themselves and their families. They get the highest reward in the afterlife and all their sins are erased. Today, efforts to remember those who died aboard the flight continue. Several families have started charities to commemorate their lost loved ones.

What has brought comfort for some is an Egyptian expression that says, “The way you die reflects a lot about the way you lived.” The martyrs of Flight MS804 died on a Thursday. The very next day was Friday, when they were prayed for in the mosques—the close timing suggests just how very dearly God loved them and how they will never be forgotten.

The post In Egypt, the “Prayer for the Absentees” of Flight MS804 Still Resonates appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But when were they ever otherwise than hard? Democracy has always been vulnerable to extreme opinions and dogmatic certainties. Sometimes the price of free speech is listening to things you don’t want to hear.

Theater holds a possible remedy, though, to some of our worst tendencies. It’s pretty simple. We need more tragedy.

Of course, tragedy might seem remote and irrelevant. To many it is dimly remembered as something to do with hubris, catharsis, and tragic flaws. We hear the word tragedy in the news mainly when it’s misapplied to some disaster, natural or otherwise. But it needn’t be either irrelevant or misappropriated. Tragedy is not just the stuff of English tests. It has a long and illustrious history as a salve for self-government. No coincidence that democracy and tragedy arose around the same time in ancient Athens.

While scholars disagree about exactly how tragedy arose, we are certain that it evolved alongside Athenian democracy. Athenians understood that what they saw onstage taught them truths and ways of thinking vital for their roles as citizens. Like the law courts, tragedy was a civic institution. Funded by the state, it was perhaps the greatest citizenship class ever.

The most important tragic lessons warn against extremism. Tragedy centers on heroes who, paradoxically, are passionate to do precisely what the gods decree. They are men and women who invite their fate with extreme self-regard combined with all-or-nothing thinking.

Consider Oedipus the tyrant, eponymous hero of Sophocles’ most famous tragedy. Witnessing a plague ravage his home city of Thebes, Oedipus boasts that he, “whom all men call the great,” is the only person who can save the day. Sound familiar? “I am the only one who can fix this,” tweeted Donald Trump last month. He was stumping on the loss of American jobs to Mexico, but it’s an attitude he uses throughout his political performance.

And tragedy offers its comeuppance. The plague in Thebes is caused by the unsolved murder of the previous king of Thebes, Oedipus’ father—who was slain by his only son. That is the very definition of tragic irony. Admittedly less tragic but no less ironic is the fact that, tweets to the contrary, Trump has been accused of outsourcing jobs to foreign employers. No one is the “only one” to fix anything, tragedy tells us. In fact, thinking that way is a trait of those who cause problems.

A related insight comes from Oedipus’ own headstrong daughter, Antigone. In her eponymous tragedy, having apparently learned nothing from her father’s example, Antigone is certain that she alone knows what piety is and what the gods want—the burial of her rebel brother. But self-righteousness runs in the family, on both sides. Antigone’s maternal uncle Creon, current ruler of Thebes, is just as adamant that he knows best. The gods do not honor traitors, he asserts, punctuating his assertion by burying his niece alive. Antigone, always swift to stress her independence, even in the choice of death, ends her own life by hanging before she can serve out Creon’s sentence. As Hegel almost said once, tragic heroes have one-line bucket lists. Once that item is crossed off, you can cross off the hero as well.

Such single-minded, black-and-white thinking dominates politics today. Pundits, politicians, and private individuals alike love to make noise about the doom that will overtake us if we even consider the opinions of their opponents. Overlooking his misuse of the term, there is nonetheless something tragic in the French Prime Minister Manuel Vall’s recent prediction that a U.K. “Brexit” would spell “tragedy” for Britain.

Like tragic heroes, such people are convinced that they alone know what’s what and what’s right. They are especially self-righteous when it comes to self-knowledge. Oedipus was positive he knew himself inside out: He was a simple man, a straightforward man, a self-made man. (“Men of the people” are a dime a dozen in American politics. Remember George W. Bush’s gestures of folksiness from atop a trust fund?)

But despite the Delphic injunction to “know thyself,” we never quite succeed. Even the brightest light, when shone against the self, casts a shadow. Oedipus may be able to solve the Sphinx’s riddle, but he must also recognize that he himself is a riddle that defies reason—his children’s brother, his mother’s husband, his father’s slayer, his city’s savior and its destroyer. The consequences of this forced recognition are horrific: He loses his sight, his homeland, and his wife and mother at one fell swoop.

Such consequences are not restricted to tragic heroes. Politicians are by custom if not by nature in the business of projecting false images of themselves. And then, when we find out the “truth,” that they are not really what they seem, we are horrified, ashamed, and feel betrayed. Richard Nixon swore he was not a crook. The White House tapes proved otherwise. John Edwards seemed a model of sympathy. The handling of his extramarital affair tells another story.

As classics scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant realized, tragedy teaches us that those who blindly adhere to a single-minded perspective will, like Oedipus, inevitably be forced to confront the opposite point of view, the perspective they had hitherto refused to even consider. In comedy we laugh. In tragedy we cry. But the cause of both is the same: We recognize a yawning chasm between what should be and what is. Tragedy teaches by negative example. The great stage and literary tragedies reveal the horrible consequences of seeing things in black and white and so encourage us to discern shades of gray. They promote what the Greeks called sophrosyne, one of those “untranslatable” words usually translated as “moderation.”

Smack dab in the middle of a speech in the middle of Antigone a character called Haemon advocates this middle-of-the-road approach to life. “Don’t think that you alone know the truth and everyone else is wrong. Such individuals, when they are opened up, are found to be hollow inside.” Unfortunately, it is often such “hollow men” who seem to make the biggest noise and to have the greatest courage of their convictions. But sometimes these people are heard above the rest simply because they are empty inside. Their souls are echo chambers, amplifying pin drops to thunder claps.

Tragedy diagnoses this hollowness—and listens for the softer voice of sophrosyne that might better guide our governments and our lives. Tragedy challenged Athenian citizens to question their own black-and-white thinking, to open their minds to the perspectives of others. This is not to say that ancient Athens was perfect. Far from it. It was rife with xenophobes, demagogues, and warmongers. It was propped up by slave labor. Its women residents not only did not have the right to vote, they were almost certainly dissuaded from attending those very tragedies that extolled democracy. It was a culture with a lot of work to do.

But so is ours. Which is why we can’t afford to discard the millennia-old art form that can help us address very contemporary problems. Athens needed tragedy. We do, too.

The post What the Oracles of Ancient Greece Can Tell Us About American Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.