By Ande Jacobson
I was thinking back to a show years ago when I moved from the pit to the cast as an actor. I wrote about my experience of climbing out of the pit in a commentary piece a few months after the show closed as I prepared to jump back into the pit in another production. Being an actor rather than a musician for that production was memorable in so many ways. Overall it was a good experience to move to a new perspective and role. As I think back on that, one preshow conversation keeps coming to mind in a completely different light than it shed at the time. The theater company that put on the show had a long standing tradition of holding a company call before each performance. It happened after the house was open, the audience was milling about the lobby and the auditorium, and the performers had hopefully completed their final preparations to begin the performance. The entire company was invited to meet just outside of the stage left entrance. Announcements were made. Awards were sometimes given. Hugs were shared. Questions were answered. And it was a pleasant time for the company to come together as a whole before getting to places for curtain.
Before the announcements, lots of friendly conversations took place. People tended to gather by function. Actors tended to gather in small groups with other actors. Musicians tended to huddle with other musicians. Crew members tended to gather with other crew members. There was some crossover, but overall, the functional groups were pretty easily identified. It wasn’t that anybody was trying to be exclusive, it’s just that people tended gravitate toward those with whom they had worked the most through the production and with whom they had interests and experiences in common. One night, I was talking with a friend and fellow actor while a number of musicians gathered a short distance away. My friend glanced over at the group of musicians in pit blacks, and jokingly told me to go be with my own kind – i.e., my fellow musicians even though for this production I was in the cast as an actor rather than as a player or music director. We chuckled and continued our conversation until the announcements started, and I didn’t think much about it for a few years. That conversation started to haunt me a bit after 2016 though as the country’s divisions became more acute and in many cases much more dangerous.
“Go be with your own kind” takes on an ominous meaning in today’s divided and charged climate, more like West Side Story’s “A Boy Like That” where Anita warns Maria that she must stick with her own kind or there will be serious consequences. There are strict divisions of us and them that harshly exclude people, and worse, punish those who are not considered part of the “us” crowd.
As humans, we should see one another as all being the same kind. We are a single species. We have the same basic needs, yet so much of our society is stratified in dangerous ways. We’re too adept at noting all of our differences and fail to see that we really need to all be “us.” Globally. The problems that we face as a species aren’t limited to a single community, or city, or state, or nation, or even continent. The planet is a vast, interconnected ecosystem that reacts to stresses across the globe, and the planet’s resources are not infinite.
Pollution doesn’t just affect the locale where it’s created. It drifts far and wide affecting all in its path. The same is true for nuclear fallout, only that is even more extreme as we’ve seen not only from the nuclear attacks of the previous century, but from nuclear power plant accidents that have had a devastating effect far from the sources of the disasters. The devastation of climate change is even worse and is a worldwide phenomenon as the oceans rise and weather events become ever more severe putting hundreds of millions if not billions in danger over time as portions of the planet become uninhabitable by humans. As regions lose their resources, humans migrate elsewhere to find those resources, and given the societal tribalism that is all too common, they are ostracized and punished for seeking a safe habitat. The reality is that the people being forced to migrate aren’t any different from those in the regions those migrants go to at their core. They are all human.
Today in the U.S., we have a Republican administration that is actively trying to further stratify the country. It is defining a narrow group of Americans as “us” and is pushing the rest away as “them” where “us” is the worthy group in their ideology while all other groups are labeled as “them” and are to be feared and hated. The Republican majority in Congress is working to further this administration’s narrow and destructive priorities legislatively despite the objections of the Democrats, Independents, and the vast majority of the American populous. Where this ends is still an open question, but the longer it continues, the harder it will be to get back to moving forward toward a more equitable and just democratic society (not the party, the idea where everyone gets a say).
The ideals set forth by our nation’s founders in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution have never truly been met. There have always been divisions, but we were making progress until the current incarnation of the Republican Party became ideologically extreme and took over.
The scariest aspect of all of this is that it’s not just an American phenomenon. The rise of authoritarianism is a worldwide tragedy and threat. While several other democratic nations have done a better job of staving off autocratic control, the pressures that push people toward this type of ideology are still there. Human activities have hastened climate change, and only by global cooperation can we slow it down. If instead of wars and power grabs, people could see each other as fellow humans, as equals, and cooperated and worked together rather than trying to gain more power, many of these tragedies could be avoided.
I’ve written about whether it might be possible to get to a single world order where we would consider everyone to be our kind. If we could collaborate on a global scale to address the environmental and societal issues that we face, think how much we could accomplish and how much better life could be for everyone. To do that though, we can’t think in terms of different kinds of people by any of the myriad societal constructs we use to divide ourselves. All of these constructs are fiction created to separate us from the Animal Kingdom and from each other, yet we are but one species. We all have to be our kind – one kind – humankind.
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