Of plagues and pompoms

I was discussing the end of the world with my twelve-year-old son when I admitted that it was only a matter of time. I forget that my audience has only recently outgrown a hallway light left on through the night. I gazed off into the gloom as if reading headlines. “Someone will finally react with a bomb, the U.S. will attempt to intercept it with another bomb and someone else will use the opportunity to sneak in a launch just for the hell of it. That will be it — boom.” 

I shook out of my reverie to find him staring at me, gooey saucer eyes. “Will we all die?” he asked. I proceeded with another age-defying treatise on science fiction plots. “In great futuristic novels, a pocket of humans always survive and create a new civilization.” I tell him about the Black Plague of the 13th and 14th centuries. Two-thirds of Europe died; the rest were convinced they were witnessing the Apocalypse ushering in the Second Coming. They believed it was the end — whole towns wiped out, the social fabric unraveled — and yet the survivors limped along and revived and paved the way for the Renaissance. “There is always hope,” I cheer, vaguely recovering my parental discernment. He changed the subject to music or TV or summer camp, anything, poor kid. I lost him at oozing buboes.

It is easy this summer to be the kind of person who stands on street corners with a long beard and a sign calling people to repentance. After so many NPR news reports, I start contemplating life without oil, global integrity, or big chunks of the planet. My focus drifts, I wince, I turn off the radio. It is exhausting to mourn the absence of world peace — a concept that we humans endlessly gestate and labor but never actually birth.

Yet this week I discovered myself in a ballroom of 300 people, all of them wearing headband antennae with shiny gold pompoms, waving their arms, swaying and singing in unison to Monty Python’s “Look on the Bright Side of Life.” For a few sparkling hours we were all one, from different corners of our micro-world, coming together and turning all organizational swords into plowshares. 

The event was the culmination of a several-day, company-wide leadership conference. It was facilitated by a well-known corporate speaker. I am always extremely skeptical of “motivational” presentations. They tend to be too hokey, too contrived, too revival, too outside of my in-front-of-strangers comfort zone. I dragged myself to this part of the agenda and was surprised that the speaker possessed a rare blend of earthiness and charisma. She was funny, self-deprecating, and like any proper piper, wielded a magical power over movement and symbol that engaged and connected a very diverse community. She was mesmerizing — we would have followed though any city; in this case she only danced us toward a group sing-a-long.

I kept sneaking glances at people around the room I thought would be really difficult customers. I may be skeptical but I am usually tractable. I knew there were some people in the company who did not fall so easily in line. Their job is to be demanding and resistant to anything that smells like touchy-feely — just the facts ma’am, just the facts. As far as I could tell, they were smiling and shaking their pompoms like the rest of us. 

A crowd this size could just as easily been waving torches and chasing Frankenstein’s monster up a mountain. The mood of a room can change on a dime, the differences between people and departments and channels suddenly evident in dangerous relief, everyone digging trenches like a live-action game of Risk. Why was the energy in this situation so synergistic? Why had this group, this morning, decided individually and collectively to share and be open rather than dissolving into a lynch mob?       

The answer on the surface is obvious. Everyone was out of their stake-holding context, wearing their hippest outfit, sitting next to their buddies, and the facilitator was gifted at creating a Meaningful Experience. It is silly to try manufacture grand conclusions. What I continue to think about is simply how good it felt to be there.

I have felt it before — at weddings, at store openings, at athletic events, even on an airplane once.  A group of people, who may or may not be strangers, may or may not share some circumstance in common, come together, position their combined weight behind a worthy cause, and with a collective heave-ho, the world shifts for a time. It’s corny, a popular theme for a Lifetime movie, the anti-Lord-of-the-Flies scenario, yet when you’re a part of it there is something to it. 

There are factions everywhere making ridiculous, terrible, evil decisions right now. I suppose the juxtaposition of this reality with a strategically buoyant company rally is more than a stretch; it might even be insensitive. But hope is tiny these days, an unexpected germ that latches on when I am not cynical or scared. For the briefest blip I stopped thinking about the end of things, the dark of things, and just sang and danced and held hands. We know a mob can destroy; we have to remind ourselves that occasionally a crowd can become a village. 

5 responses to “Of plagues and pompoms”

  1. Lane says:

    While waiting for 8:01 and this mornings post I read the front page of the Times. Yuck. What a wretched mess Iraq is. The juxtaposition between that and this calls attention to the fact that all in all, we’ve all had it pretty good.

    I’ve been thinking about Dave’s last post and the note attached to my latest panel shippment about “due to an increase in material costs your next order will be more expensive.” The world does seem to be . . . shrinking? erroding? withering. But all things considered we’ve all had it pretty good. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

  2. a little corporate Kumbaya does the trick once in a while……
    if i knew the world were really gonna end tomorrow i would def finish off the 1/2 gallon of ben and jerry’s in the freezer no matter what the nutritial label says….

  3. Toute La Musique…: Best Of…

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  5. Collection says:

    Collection…

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