The range of human nature can be as varied as "night and day," as if our schizophrenic behavior were somehow tied to celestial mechanics. And so it seems as 24 hours turns through daylight and darkness, caring and indifference.
On the way down the elevator from an intensive care unit in St. Paul, where my friend spent the night fighting a ruthless disease, a stranger crosses the silence of elevator etiquette and inquires of my well-being.
"Who is it?" she asks, as a sister might of a brother.
On the way south from St. Paul, I stop and walk the pier that watches over Lake Pepin. Strangers will not lift their eyes in greeting. A Hmong pulls a bass from the water and holds it triumphantly for his girlfriend's camera. His radiant smile buoys me like the wind-scattered sailboats plying the river-lake.
If we are looking for apathy and evil, we need only look at the headlines.
If we are looking for empathy and good, we need only look between the lines at the patchwork of human experience.
Eventually, we find what we are looking for.
Separating compassion from cruelty in the flow of events can be as futile as sorting water into bowls. We have a paradoxical capacity for both. But we are nothing if not good sorters.
For centuries, we have made sense of the world -- if there is any sense at all to be made -- by breaking it down into parts. Reductionism has served us well, plotting the course to the moon by understanding the macro-cosmos, showering us with technological wonders by dissecting the micro-cosmos; and organizing humanity into homogenous groups by honing the sharp edge of our boundaries.
In Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic needed only the sharp edge of nationalism to begin the sort, pitting neighbor against neighbor. In "Love Thy Neighbor," Balkan War correspondent Peter Mass writes, "The rise of Serb nationalism is similar to what happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Anti-Semitism was always a strong factor in Germany, but Hitler pumped it up until it became a violent force."
The citizenry of Serbia gathered around their ethnicity like bees around a hive, and unleashed an ethnic cleansing in modern Europe not seen since the Holocaust.
In America, we have so many bowls to sort that we don't know where to begin. Political affiliation, religious conviction, ethnic origin, economic status, intellectual prowess, and office partitions separate us into constituencies huddled around our hive. A precarious civility -- and the rule of law -- demands that we practice our violence in words, which sometimes spills over into deeds.
Each night we go to bed content in our knowledge of "how things are." Each morning we wake to the world and bathe in our ignorance. We feel clean.
Then tragedy shatters our bowls. A plane strikes a building, and we shuffle through the street covered in ash, our skin rendered the same color.
A storm strikes a city and we take refuge from the flood waters on roofs, little dots of humanity seen pleading for help from the sky.
We don't need national tragedy to find our vulnerabilities. We catch them in a glance, on a smile, with a deed.
The woman in the elevator glanced my way exiting and offered a reassuring smile. The girlfriend on Lake Pepin snapped the photo and offered her own luminous smile in return.
A doctor in Srebrenica saved the lives of both Croatian victims and Serb aggressors lying next to each other in hospital beds.
My friend died on a Thursday and gathered his friends around the dinner table on a Tuesday to share laughter about hunting trips and howling dogs.
We find our humanity in elevators, on lakes, around dinner tables. We lose our humanity in the narrow space between boundaries. We only need to look in the right places.
Frydenlund lives in Prairie du Chien;
efrydenlund@centurytel.net.