instances — tends to group Americans more
by specific experiences and political outlooks
than by geography or an overall sense of
national purpose.
“You’re seeing local experiences where this is
affecting `my community,’ but nationally my
impression is that this is not something that
is bringing us together as Americans living
through this. Maybe in two weeks,” says Jennifer
Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette
College in Easton, Pa., who studies personal
experiences of watershed public events.
“To identify a shared experience, there
needs to be a community that shares that
experience,” she says. “Is it happening to us’? Is it happening tomy’ social group, my’ people? If it’s happening tomy’ people, I will talk about
it in a certain way.”
The “my people” part of that is dicey. Americans
have always been drawn to single narratives;
in some ways, this nation exists only because
it told the story of its existence in its founding
documents. In reality, though, there are just
about as many storylines as there are Americans.
Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, in isolation
in Rome after her nation’s outbreak, published a
letter in The Guardian aimed at fellow Europeans
“from your future.” It might as well have been
written to Americans, too.
“We are now where you will be in a few days,”
she wrote. “That boat in which you’ll be sailing
in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the
same to everyone, nor is it actually the same for
everyone: It never was.”
Perhaps, then, it is a paradox. For Americans,
maybe the shared experience is realizing as