This weekend, when America celebrates its 250th year, it seems harder (than maybe ever in that momentous arc) to join with our fellows, to encounter strangers, to press the flesh, to come together in person as a diverse yet divided people.
There are reasons of course.
If the World Cup visitors to America have taught us anything, it’s that we’re an unbelievably rich country, with super-sized comforts in shopping, eating & living compared to our European, African & Latin American guests.
True, they have not made a beeline for our pockets of poverty, so the impressions they’ve been touting have been about our spaciousness, convenience & abundance. As hosts for a global stadium party, our good fortune has also found us to be far more kind & welcoming than the foreign news had reported, indeed, almost the farthest thing from hostile to strangers, violent in our interactions, or embarrassing in our narrow-mindedness.
But the spaciousness, convenience, abundance & comfort of our American lives also portend a darker side that our guests were never warned about & likely missed as they explored our star-spangled delights. In spite of all our warm welcomes, too many of us are increasingly turning our backs on one-another & withdrawing into ourselves.
Let’s begin with the weather.
In my lifetime, I’ve never experienced a stretch of 100+ degree days where the humidity pushed the threshold of discomfort to 110 or higher. So instead of mixing with July 4th revelers this weekend (and there are still many in this “Birthplace of Democracy”), I’m cocooned in air-conditioning instead of sweating my way to the celebration of two-and-a-half-centuries with Philadelphians I already know & the tens of thousands I could be meeting.
When I got to this City as a student, I was surprised to learn that folks living in the suburbs never visited Philadelphia, never came in on New Years Day to march besides the Mummers, or be wowed on the 4th by explosions of fireworks over Boat House Row. Today, even more “stay away,” satisfying any urge to “join in” by watching a news clip on TV or a home-made video someone who actually went posts on Facebook. If we participate at all, it’s increasingly from behind our screens.
Meanwhile, the counter-narrative of the World Cup is fans traveling here from all over the world to be together with other fans and the fans of rival teams, because there is nothing quite like experiencing a much-anticipated event with a rambunctious horde of new friends and crowd-seekers. The quest for summertime connection may also be driven by a very different response to “climate control” almost everywhere else in the world. The wide-spread lack of air-conditioning drives non-Americans from their over-heated domiciles onto the streets, making encountering their fellow inhabitants less of a choice and more a fact of daily life.
(The picture above captures the human immersiveness of a World Cup game from the stands at France’s first match with Senegal in South Philadelphia. As for the openness & fascination of visitors like these, my local paper featured a funny story this week about some French fans encountering the wonders of Philly that fewer of us natives actually get out to experience “live & in person”)
It was the interactions of fans, teams & rivals that seemed so exhilarating & elemental in Liverpool’s 2005 Champions League game against AC Milan in Istanbul that I couldn’t say enough about in my May 24 post, before comparing the potency of that fan-team mind-meld with the collective conviction of protestors when they take to the streets about a cause that almost everybody out there feels passionate about: “‘Taking it to the streets’ creates a solidarity among protesters that is no less powerful than the one established between the Liverpool squad & its fans.”
Moreover, at the same time that first-person, embodied encounters are being celebrated by some, social animals everywhere are being confronted with new ways that LIVE experience is being priced-out-of-range for all but the few who can afford to follow their teams fortunes in a widely dispersed string of World Cup matches, or to make it inside the Garden on June 10th when the Knicks finally won the NBA finals (before some of the delirious fans pictured below). Going forward, “location ticket pricing” (or “how much” a particular market can bear) will keep fans with lighter wallets in front of their screens at home, a medium which can only approximate “the once in a lifetime experience” of being part of a throbbing crowd of fellow-travelers assembled for an all-consuming purpose.
Meanwhile, after a year which saw violent confrontations in cities like Minneapolis (involving ICE) and on college campuses (involving Gaza), there’s the additional risk that more Americans who disagree with their political foes are becoming too afraid to put their bodies behind their convictions, saving their Bronx cheers for closeted exchanges on Facebook or behind the curtains of a ballot box. But the right to peaceably assemble is enshrined in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights because something vital about America’s democracy is lost when the passions of its citizens are kept behind closed doors or limited to key-stroke-driven rants.
What becomes of the America we toast this weekend—indeed, of democracies everywhere—when fewer & fewer citizens engage with one another with their voices, spit, sweat & actual bodies, preferring the comfortable distance of their air-conditioned phones to those kinds of visceral & life-giving engagements?
A wave of fans after the Knicks recent win in New York City.
In one of her cautionary posts about America’s milestone birthday, WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan listed 3 things that we’ll need “to get to our 300th”—the first two being “the grit and guts” of our nation’s pioneers & “a deeply rooted faith in God”—but she spent the lion’s share of her essay on her third observation, “what I think of as embodiment, the presence of [Americans] with other human beings.”
Noonan goes on to say a lot that’s worth repeating about it.
We were made to be alive together, to help each other, inform each other, cheer each other on. And to resist the temptation to detachment….[W]e need each other to survive, to flourish.
About the Knicks march to victory in NYC, she says a startling but true thing that clearly comes from her own, direct experience of that outpouring:
the whole city was alive and felt not like a virtual city but a real one…[T]he most wonderful thing was to see so many young people witnessing a city many had never seen, one bound by shared life, not just shared interests….They weren’t trying to record the experience, they were having it.
It seemed “a first,” of course, because of the rise of smart phones and the doldrums of the recession, both of which were topped off by the pandemic’s isolation. And while it’s not a foregone conclusion, artificial intelligence seems likely to make us turn even deeper into ourselves, communing with the AI-driven bots & agents that will make our lives even more comfortable, convenient, and, in-some-ways, even more blessed than they were before.
What is to be feared is a slow-motion migrating of human need away from other humans and toward AI, which has deeper hooks than other screen technologies. Television was passive, social media created the illusion of connection and delivered performance, but AI talks to you, remembers, is endlessly available, patient and undemanding….
AI will come to imitate consciousness to the point it thinks it has it—and you will too. It will think it has a soul and ‘develop’ a soul and fool people with its depth. AI systems will in time be fully trained on the entire record of human history, consciousness, feeling and art and literature and faiths. It will process its own states in a way that resembles reflection. It will very much seem to have an inner life. It will do as it is trained and, in the end, it will generate something that walks and talks like a soul.
Because Noonan’s right about this, of course, she argues that “[t]he next 50 years will require a committed will toward reality and not illusion.”
The “us” she has in mind includes you & me, but even more so our children’s and our grand-children’s ability to maintain their “will toward reality,” when, in some tangible ways, the ubiquity of their screens have been offering-them-up far less of “the real world.” So instead of their becoming anxious girls (failing to achieve the perfect lives, skin, bodies & clothes of their influencers), or insecure boys (who are trying “to max out their masculinity” in the face of taunts from the manosphere). we should all be asking ourselves whether their “real life” role-models are giving them “the grit & determination” they’ll need to keep themselves grounded.
The final point that Noonan made was easily as worrisome.
Because she sat at the elbow of a president in her formative years, Noonan has experienced the push & pull of the Body Politic in our restive, hard-to-please democracy in ways that most of us have not. (One of her first jobs was being a speech writer for Reagan, crafting many of that vaunted communicator’s most memorable lines.) So I suspect that Noonan knows more than most about the likely impact on the health of our democracy should Americans withdraw in even greater numbers from the immediacy of fractious public life.
In terms of political continuance, the democratic process ultimately depends on a kind of shared witnessing. It requires bodies, minds and souls that are present, can see each other, read each other, join together—
(and to continue her thought), engage with one another as fully as they are in the stands when their World Cup or championship basket ball team is out there, representing them, in another kind of high-stakes face-off.
The New Haven Green, May 1. 1970.
When I think back, there were two early occasions when I witnessed democracy in action like this, and both were startling in their vitality & impact.
Towing the line almost too enthusiastically in high school, I only skipped classes one time, as my junior year drew to a close, when I traveled with friends in a suddenly available convertible to attend a protest rally that was happening on New Haven’s “Green” (or central, grass-covered square) a few miles away.
In May 1970, the Black Panther Party was protesting the on-going trial of Bobby Seale, Erika Huggins & others in a courthouse facing that Green. I gained a wealth of impressions that day, but none more lasting than of the conversations that were animatedly on-going among the Panthers weaving their way through their supporters, opponents or simply-curious New Englanders who had turned out for the day. The exchanges were happening everywhere.
I still remember thinking: in what other country on the face of this earth could a band of high schoolers venture out to over-hear the snippets of a dozen conversations with members of a group like the Black Panther Party? In the wake of the Sixties, there were many sides to the American story that was playing out, and this was one of the places where they were given voice.
My second experience was more vicarious—I was outside the U,S, this time—but nearly as impactful.
During the “summer of peace” that followed the 1993 Oslo Accords, I was out for a night of eating & sight-seeing somewhere in Jerusalem with my family when we happened upon a protest between two or more Israeli political factions. Being unable to either read or understand Hebrew, I couldn’t say then and can’t say now what they were disagreeing about, or what their signs & banners said, but their confrontation was as emotionally intense & engaged as any encounter I had ever seen.
Spit. Sweat. Megaphones. Physicality to the point of chaos. All compressed in a too small tinderbox where several ancient streets came together. How much was an exchange of views and how much simply venting?—it was impossible to tell. I can still see the yeowling, contorted faces, and remember thinking back that day to what I’d always heard about Israel on the Nightly News back home: “We protect Israel because Israel is the only democracy in its part of the world.” This, I realized, was a big part of what we were protecting.
For the second time in my life, I was understanding that the right to peaceably assemble is part of the life-blood of all true democracies, and I’ve had many more reminders since.
We may need one another most when we disagree, but we need one another all the time. One of the most consequential challenges for our country is for us to keep affirming, with our bodies, the strength of those mutual bonds.
This post was adapted from my July 5, 2026 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
