how to negotiate and navigate current events and meet your fellow citizen on the street...
very thoughtful piece from PP winning guy...
In 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, or the subprime mortgage crisis, or the succession of the first black president by a reality TV star braggart, Jeffrey Eugenides wrote: “One’s country was like oneself, the more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed about.” That sentence constitutes the dark heart of a sly yet pathos-packed tale called “Great Experiment” in Fresh Complaint, his recently published first collection of short stories. Twelve years on, surely American national shame is greater than any personal shame?
“Oh it’s gotta be equal,” Eugenides sighs. “We all have a slave history past,” and then he laughs sadly. “I think that kind of inventory is endless in both directions – personally and nationally. Right now, perhaps it’s easier to pay attention to the national side of things, but they kind of go hand in hand, don’t they? There are going to be personal blots that plague you as you try to figure out how to negotiate and navigate current events and meet your fellow citizen on the street. A nation is just a bunch of people, so all the problems that happen in the nation are personal, on some level.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/25/jeffrey-eugenides-interview?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=254008&subid=17536001&CMP=GT_US_collection
