“We’re all we have left. We ought to be able to stick together against everything. If we don’t have each other, we don’t have anything.” — from The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.
The Outsiders
I was inspired to rebrand my Book Club posts as Weekend Reads after realizing that despite loving to read, I don’t quite get around to reading as many whole books as I’d like. But, I do love to read blogs, news articles, and other pieces, and I want to share them and my initial thoughts.
This week, I went back and re-read an old childhood classic: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. It has me wondering about the quality of friendships today. In my line of work, I work with a lot of young people, and whether they are teenagers or just turning legal, it’s heart breaking to see so many of them struggle with personal interactions. The missing quality for many of them appears to be empathy—our ability to vicariously experience the views, emotions, and feelings of others.
Empathy
I remember sitting in my 7th grade classroom (I had a beat-up wooden desk in the back row), reading the chapters a day late for class, but still enjoying the book. The setting is 1960s Oklahoma—a wild time of social change, civil rights movements, the Vietnam war, and cultural shifts. When I read and watch media from the past, I get the sense that people were working toward something better in their lives and the lives of the people around them. There seemed to be far more empathy for people and their communities compared to today where the end goal appears to be transactional relationships and control.
In recent days, I find myself reading more stories that take place before the year 2020. Although I am not normally a stickler for the vintage days, I absolutely miss the qualities of life that made being a human worthwhile. The Outsiders reminds me of this. Even though the characters are rough around the edges with heartbreaking backgrounds, the friendship and family bonds were strong. In their own ways, each character possessed some empathetic quality that allowed them to care for each other, and/or break under the pressure when tragedy strikes.
Humanity
Even though it is nearly sixty years old (at the time I am writing this), the book is a breath of fresh air among the AI drivel soaking the internet. It is becoming more difficult to discern the difference between reality and non-reality, so I have been finding more meaning in works of art published before 2020. It is a truly terrifying time since there is this race to create machines and entities to outpace the capabilities of the human mind… without any care on whether or not we should create anything more intelligent than us.
I sense that with our changing relationship between reality and non-reality (ai and internet), it is crucial to read as many human-written works as possible so as not to forget that nothing that proceeds us could be possible without the predecessors. And, to maintain the most important humanist quality of all, we should remember to always read and practice empathy.
