College football teams clapping hands as they break from the huddle get it....theatre casts silently valuing each other just before the opening night curtain get it...monks in daily prayers together get it....group hugs at anniversaries and birthdays and wakes get it too.
"It" is that shadowy reality that accompanies us even in the most private rooms of our most private solitudes. Like a Dickensian spirit, it is the vigilant reminder that we are not for a moment possible in this world without others. Parents, siblings, teachers, clergy, co-workers, ER attendants, police, and yes power-line and street-cleaning teams.
No one solos in this life. No one....!
Whence then this cocksure warrior stance that speaks words like: It all starts with me! If I can dream it I can do it! I'm being all I can be! Sure, this is what sales managers and Amway speakers get their audiences to stand and chant. But they lie, and I can speak with embarrassed authority. For I accepted checks for writing some of those lies for some of those executives.
I once wrote something for Daniel Schorr, the celebrated journalist who died last week. He was the guest speaker for one of the Fortune 500 companies holding their annual sales conference in Vegas. The words were in his style and rhythms, but the message was not. Freelance writers for big corporations are usually hired to sculpt high-energy rhetoric for speakers too busy to write their own stuff.
Every speaker that day took my hired words and delivered them with varying degrees of lectern comfort. Not Dan. When he scanned my draft he said, "Look. kid, I'll just wing it up there!" And he did. Instead of the usual corporate blather about profit and progress and prosperity, Schorr lectured.
His pitch was a bit jarring for this audience of hustlers. He reminded them that no one solos in the symphony of life. Your notes make no sense without the harmonies of others to go with it. Which is why he went on to say things were very different from when he got on Richard Nixon's infamous "list." Back then, Schorr attacked a president for documentable actions. In contrast to more recent attacks by dis-informed malcontents who object simply to their vague but cocksure instant-gratification frustrations.
In other words, fellas, if you're going to fault your boss or your president, have a reason besides large doses of raw anger about how-things-just-aren't-going-right. Tea anyone....?
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I wish I had met him.
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