A couple years ago now, friends and I attempted to take our filmmaking hobby to the next level, increasing our organization and making a real production company out of it. The problem we faced was the fact that several of our members were soon to be or already departed for other parts of the country, forcing us to use technological tools and rely less on simple in person presences and meetings.
I love technology, I always have. And I have great optimism when it comes to the power of communication technologies today, especially the internet in all its forms. But our venture came apart pretty quick. It did so for many reasons, only some attributable to the difficulty of being physically separated, but it nevertheless provided a sobering lesson about the limitations of and made clear the importance of a very simple thing.
Being in the same room with somebody.
No matter the technology, no matter the work needed to be done or the relationships involved, simply being in the same room with someone is a unique and inimitable reality.
Which is why I am so grateful that all of the candidates, Republican and Democrat, stood on the same stage, if ever so briefly, and actually stood face to face tonight. It's an important thing.
Of course it was all an act. Perfectly affable people chatting and joking with colleagues they call traitors and fools when in different rooms. But I can live with that, so long as it remains physically possible for political opponents to stand next to each other and even pretend to be affable. So long as even the artifice of friendship is possible, as long as so simple a thing as physically standing in the same room with each other remains possible, then fundamentally, I think we'll be okay.
Naive perhaps. Overly simplistic, certainly. Not something to be taken for granted, but still something to be grateful for, given the realities of many other countries.