drmstream[writing]

With the onslaught of stim­u­lus baked into mod­ern life, the con­stant per­sua­sion of the pub­lic dia­logue and the desire of each one of us to assess oth­ers for their fit­ness in our tribe, we expe­ri­ence con­stant pres­sure on our identity.

The work of becom­ing an adult in mod­ern Amer­ica is to inte­grate iden­tity into action, to be able to present a cohe­sive and resilient self in every sit­u­a­tion, pub­lic or private.

In the past, a reli­able short-hand existed to help com­mu­ni­cate or uncover iden­tity: eth­nic­ity, fam­ily, place, edu­ca­tion, inter­ests. These pieces of infor­ma­tion, com­bined with cul­tural ref­er­ence points and per­sonal expe­ri­ence, gave one a cer­tain degree of com­fort that the sub­ject would behave, in dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, in cer­tain pre­dictable ways.

Those cues are not as use­ful in deter­min­ing the nature of the per­son any longer. The story of the expe­ri­ence, if told hon­estly, is the best sense of the per­son. “Tell me the story of how you arrived here in the way that will best help me under­stand who you are” is the lost effec­tive way to understand.

And then the ques­tion is how resilient and inte­grated is the iden­tity. For that is the key ques­tion we need to know about the peo­ple we give our trust to.

That is the ques­tion asked of Obama, in re cam­paign and after. That is what some peo­ple intu­itively grasped for and oth­ers could not pos­si­bly trust.

That is the post-modern expres­sion of the self.

— Post From My iPhone