WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson is hosting a SouthBound Live event this week. To get the full experience, you have to come, listen and engage. In his "On My Mind" commentary, Tomlinson reflects on how that may be challenging since just going out and seeing people has become a fight against inertia.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the simple act of gathering in a public place and talking to other people. It used to be simple, anyway.
It’s been on my mind because I’m hosting an event this Thursday night, a SouthBound Live discussion on the future of Charlotte. We’ve got great panelists. Charis Blackmon — she’s the executive director of the West Side Community Land Trust; Alyson Craig — she’s Charlotte’s planning director and one of the architects of the city’s 2040 plan; and Monique Douglas — she’s executive director of the Brooklyn Collective, an arts group focused on inclusivity and equity.
We did the first of these events a few weeks ago at WFAE’s new uptown home, our Center for Civic and Community Engagement. We had an excellent crowd and an important discussion. And I went away thinking, oh yeah, that’s what that feels like.
The pandemic bent our brains in so many ways that none of us will live long enough to understand the full effects. But one clear impact is that people just don’t go out as much.
Attendance at churches, museums, movie theaters and Broadway shows still haven’t come back to pre-pandemic levels. Restaurants are more of a mixed bag. The one clear increase since before the pandemic is in concert attendance. Taylor Swift cures a lot of problems.
There are other big cultural shifts compounding the issue, of course. You can access pretty much every movie or TV show ever made through your remote control, and get any kind of food delivered directly to your door. That’s a blessing when you’re exhausted on a Tuesday night and just need to flop down on the couch. It’s not as good for the health of the community as a whole.
What all this isolation adds up to is that some people are either afraid to hang out anymore, or have kind of forgotten how to do it. That unstructured time, just chatting with somebody new, is part of the glue that holds us together. I know some of you are thinking right now about the time you were stuck in a terrible conversation at a party and couldn’t shake loose. But I bet you can also remember a stray conversation that made your day, or maybe even changed your life.
My favorite times at events tend to be the before and after. That first SouthBound Live event was so good I couldn’t have asked for more. But what really warmed my heart was just seeing people wander up and talk to one another, wander off in the corner for a deeper conversation, get each other’s contact info so they could get together again.
Not to be too grandiose about it, but that’s how a society survives — ordinary people getting together and learning from one another. All it requires sometimes is getting out of the house.
(By the way, for tickets and more info for Thursday night’s SouthBound Live event, go to wfae.org/charlotteforward.)
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
