(This post went out with only the headline and no content due to a technical error on my part. I apologize! I’m glad you found this!)
I’ve been reading the charming series of memoirs by a ‘veterinary surgeon’ in Northern England in the period of WWII and shortly before, “All Creatures Great and Small,” by James Herriot. I’ve never read it before and I’m simply enchanted by it. There are certainly penny pinchers, overly moralistic farmers,and children who are cruel to animals, among the vast and varied cast of characters in these books. But the writer’s attitude is fundamentally good-natured and accepting of them all. One might be tempted to say that Herriot describes his time and place through rose colored glasses, but it seems to me that most people would describe their actual communities this way. Over time one makes peace with the nutty folks, takes care of the simple ones, learns to avoid or ameleorate the mean onees, and generally come to look on the whole with some degree of benevolence. It occurs to me that this was normal forever, until quite recently.
The only thing I can think of in contemporary life which is comparable is the “Humans of New York” Facebook group and it’s copycats, which revel in the glorious oddities of the people of that fair city, without judgment.But the dominant voices in popular culture tend to see any positivity about the way things are as an act of denying that person’s pet set of injustices, largely determined at any moment by the cable news cycle and the newspaper and social media arteries which spread its venom. No doubt they are often true injustices, and the person’s reaction to them is genuine in many cases.
So I look out onto the world of the self idealizing past, and the self immolating present, and it strikes me that perhaps equating generous assumptions about our neighbors, and a default attitude of friendliness toward them, despite any disagreements, was a healthier way to go through life than an automatic, socially enforced cynicism.
In any case, if you’d like to read something entertaining, which will fundamentally help you to reorient yourself into a positive attitude toward your fellow creatures, I can’t recommend “All Creatures Great and Small,” highly ennough.
Living here in Israel, I'm loving the perspective you describe. So easy to get annoyed at the person who just cheated me by charging me too much to fix my washing machine. Or the tree spraying man who sprayed my trees, charged me a lot, and turned out to have spraying the trees with something the trees never needed. Or the neighbor next door who barely has said hello to me more than 2 or three times in as many years. For better to chuckle. And then focus instead on my warm and generous neighbors up and down the rest of the block, the young man who owns the deli whom I've come to adore, the waitress in tonight's restaurant whose radiant smile warmed the room, the courage of the soldiers who keep us all safe....
And there are sequels! more All Creatures books to read!!! I also really liked the PBS series.
Living in a small town this is the only way to keep peace.