New Year’s Resolution

This year, I resolve to be less of a snob.

I attended The Seattle Pops last month and didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. The music was simplistic; the jokes were awful. Nearly everyone in the audience seemed to be having a good time. Why not me?

To counteract this, I came up with a desnobification list. I would watch romantic comedies, the number one movie in America, and NASCAR. I would listen to top 40 radio, eat at chain restaurants and read romance novels. So many people enjoy these things, but I am not interested in them. And at least for me in these areas, there’s only a short step from disinterest to condescension. It creates distance between me and other people that I don’t want to be there.

Or, maybe snobbiness isn’t really the issue. Maybe I am just having trouble re-integrating myself into US culture. I recently came across this passage in Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf:

‘Both distance and belonging are essential. Belonging without distance destroys: I affirm my exclusive identity as Croatian and want either to shape everyone in my own image or elimate them from my world. But distance without belonging isolates: I deny my identity as Croatian and draw back from my own culture. But more often than not, I become trapped in the snares of counter-dependence. I deny my Croatian identity only to affirm even more forcefully my identity as a member of this or that anti-Croatian sect. And so an isolationist “distance without belonging” slips into a destructive “belonging without distance.” Distance from a culture must never degenerate into flight from that culture but must be a way of living within that culture.’

Maybe my new year’s resolution should just be to figure out how to be an American again.