Anne Snyder: My friend Amber Lapp has spent years living among the people and places she writes about, not simply studying working-class communities, but becoming a neighbor. On the opening night of the Understory Festival, she reflected on what these years of listening have taught her about loneliness, dignity, and the quiet work of belonging. This reflection originally appeared in our opening night episode, “What Is Struggling to Be Born?” framed by an address from Fr. Tomáš Halík. We are releasing it here on its own because its vision has lingered with us.
Recorded at the National Cathedral on the Understory’s opening night, here is Amber Lapp.
Amber Lapp: In 2010, my husband David and I moved from New York City to a working-class town in Ohio, not far from where I grew up. We moved there because we were researching the marriage gap, the way that family trends were bifurcating across class lines. We interviewed 115 young adults, and we went into these interviews most interested in marriage beliefs.
But we came out shaken by stories of trauma, of a capricious economy that treated workers as disposable, of what people describe to us as their trust issues.
Over time, the people we interviewed became neighbors and friends, and we started to understand more. I remember one night getting a call in the middle of the night from a friend of mine, Stephanie, a single mother living in subsidized housing. She was in the midst of an emotional crisis, and she said to me, “I’m just such a screw-up.” She felt interiorly hollowed out, worthless, and like everything she touched turned to ash, no matter how hard she worked, no matter how hard she tried. I came to realize that this was not an uncommon feeling. So many people were battling it, fighting their demons, as they described it.
It made me wonder how many of our social troubles are downstream from people doubting their dignity, feeling badly about themselves. It seemed to my husband David and I that the antidote to alienation was solidarity and a reclaiming of social respect for working people as fellow citizens who genuinely have so much to contribute. We saw the way that participation made people light up, but we also noticed the obstacles to organizing, and the frequency with which people said no, or said yes but then didn’t show.
To be sure, economic and scheduling challenges were a huge part of this. But I’ll never forget when a friend of mine, who I had invited to about a dozen discussion groups that we were hosting at our house—invited her about a dozen times, and every time she said, “I have to work, I have to work”—but she finally took me aside and said, “Amber, I really appreciate the invitation, but the truth is I have intense social anxiety and I just can’t be in a group of people.”
Now, since that time, I’ve ceased to be surprised when someone confides in me that this is the reason for their own lack of participation. I could give many examples. Most recent being, not that long ago, I was getting to know a neighbor who’s very interested in politics and gardening. We were becoming friends. And I told her one day that she would be an amazing village councilwoman and asked her if she’d considered running before. And she said that she would love to, but she suffers from these anxiety attacks, which are random and debilitating. And she said that our house was one of the few places that she would go. It caught me by surprise because she’s a wonderful social person with so many gifts.
Just what is—what is this? People seem to agree that whatever it is, it’s made worse by the feeling that we are living on this vast digital prairie. Some days, the loneliness of relationships that are tended to mostly via, like, these disembodied forms of communication can make even me feel like I’m living among ghosts.
So if this is where we find ourselves, this is what I see. On the one hand, people of goodwill working for nonprofits and institutions and wanting to do good. And then on the other, people who are alienated and squatters on a kind of institutional no-man’s-land. They may be unaware of these institutions, or aware but skeptical, uncertain if they will actually belong. Like my friend who asked me before I came here, trying to control the anger that was shaking her voice, “Do you honestly think that the people in D.C. are willing to listen?”
If civil society is that strata between the person and the state that exists to mediate between the two, it seems to me that there’s this other layer here, this space between the individual and civil society institutions themselves. And it is in this space, this institutional no-man’s-land, where I see something struggling mightily to be born. Mediating relationships, pathways to participation, micro-institutions, if you will. And I see this most vividly in the recovery world and the proliferation of small-scale institutions built to respond to addiction. This struck me when I was at the graduation of a dear friend who is celebrating a sobriety milestone.
It seems to me like this is the level where real innovation could occur. It will likely be less formal and more personal, basic and ordinary, and therefore may be difficult to raise money for. An emphasis on depth, not breadth. Not crafted primarily for the donor class, but actually for and with and by the working class.
This will cost something of all of us. For those of us do-gooders, it means ceding control, and recognizing that a strong root system is the only way to sustain scale. For us screw-ups, it means not closing the door on hope. Because it is my strong sense that it is actually the screw-ups, though the ones too easily dismissed, whose hard-won insight we now most need.
