Class 47. Cultural Touchstones: Can Arts, Entertainment, and Sports Bring Us Together? (FREE BONUS)

Why we need to recover the shared experiences, rituals, and culture that transcend differences and connect us as Americans.

If you are just joining The Freedom Academy, welcome! As a reminder, this post is a standalone “lesson” and you do not need to be caught up to follow along. I’ll reference any previous posts that offer relevant background, and you can always visit the syllabus and catch up at your own leisure. All class posts have an audio recording if you prefer to multitask while listening to me lecture!

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If you are of a certain age (cough cough), clicking on the video above is going to bring back some memories. For me, it was skating on Saturdays and Sundays at Plaza Roller Rink in Hampton, Virginia, where I was a part of the competitive skating “club,” and singing the lyrics at the top of my lungs, along with everyone else. And yes, competitive roller skating is a thing:

For any young(er) people reading this who don’t remember WATW or never heard it, suffice it to say that it was just a cornucopia of the biggest musical stars of the 1980s who came together across musical genres. Any teen watching the video at the time would basically be the heart-eyed emoji.

“We Are the World” was a charity response to the Ethiopian famine of 1983-1985 which killed an estimated 1 million people. It followed on the heels of the British charity single, “Do They Know it’s Christmas” by a collaboration of British artists called Band Aid (and also nostalgic, for me). The WATW single sold 20 million physical copies, making it the fastest-selling U.S. pop single in history, the eighth best-selling single of all time, and the first single to be certified “multi” (quadruple) platinum. More importantly, the song raised $80 million (about $240 million in today’s dollars) for famine relief and humanitarian aid in Africa.

Apart from its financial and charitable success, though, WATW was a cultural touchstone for every American of that era. I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, in any region of the country, of any age, who hadn’t heard the song. This was, of course, the time before streaming, when “playlists” were determined by radio DJs and delivered to captive audiences, and there was some general consensus on what the top pop hits were (cue the memory of me and my older sister riding in the station wagon, listening to Casey’s Top 40, and my sari-clad mom singing along with us in the driver’s seat to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”).

It wasn’t just music. I have to admit that I am not a huge follower of professional, or even college, sports (I think this is just a function of both where I grew up and where I went to school, and the fact that my parents didn’t follow any teams)¹, so I am sure that there are so many shared moments in this arena that I am unaware of. But I was always a huge Olympics afficionado, from a young age — something that used to be a major shared cultural experience in America. Who doesn’t remember the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union or Mary Lou Retton’s perfect floor routine in 1984 (I named my Cabbage Patch doll after her!) or the 1992 U.S. Dream Team for basketball?

Again, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who hadn’t even heard of these athletes or events, let alone not seen them — live — when they happened.

Fragmented Reality

We talk a lot these days about the lack of shared factual reality — as a result of information siloes and mis- and disinformation — and how it has contributed to a breakdown of our democracy. President Obama observed in an interview with The Atlantic that our inability to agree on basic facts are an “epistemological crisis” that renders democracy inoperable. This is, no doubt, a problem.

But I would add that we are also now suffering from a lack of a shared cultural reality. This is the shared experience of music, of entertainment, of sports — in ways that bring us together or at least make us talk and think about who we are as Americans.

The magic of a shared cultural reality is that it allows us to internalize issues and absorb certain values without even realizing it — sort of like when as a parent you sneak vegetables into your kids’ meals by pureeing them and adding them to something like mac n’cheese. I alluded to this a bit in my lesson on the challenge of the American “we” (Class 44) and how kids of my generation were basically brainwashed on civic and democratic values through Schoolhouse Rock (which I still think needs to make a comeback).

But we had values inculcated in us in more subtle ways, as well. Do y’all remember Family Ties?

So apart from being hilarious and heartwarming and something that everyone watched, Family Ties was socializing us to a norm — that political differences aren’t existential. Here you had a Nixon-quoting, capitalism-loving, Reagan Republican teenager, with hippie, “woke,” radical-leftist parents…and they all loved each other and supported each other, rather than being on the verge of a civil war. It’s hard to imagine a show depicting anything like this in today’s political climate — especially since when your politics makes you a military target, it is existential — but this idea used to be not only normal, but funny. (Also full disclosure: I was obsessed — I mean obSESSED — with Michael J. Fox.)

Asynchronous Consumption

Most importantly, we were all watching this! Not only the same content, but on the same day, at the same time, every week. Which made the jokes, the dilemmas, the resolutions, all a part of our shared daily conversation…across generations at home, around our water coolers at work, and among our friends. Common cultural touchstones — through music, and sports, and TV shows — gave us a vehicle to have a shared language that transcended the things that made us different.

We no longer have that.

Let’s set aside our political “echo chambers” on social media and news outlets for now. We also live in our personal and private entertainment bubbles. From Spotify playlists to binge-watching Netflix, we enjoy what we want, when we want it, but have no real shared cultural conversation outside of those personal experiences. Sure, Taylor Swift’s engagement, or the season finale of Mad Men, or some amazing feat by Simone Biles might spark a collective cultural moment or conversation, briefly. But the kind of cultural touchstones like the ones I’ve highlighted above — that truly cut across racial and class and political cleavages and provided a sustained, invisible connective tissue to people we didn’t even know — really don’t exist anymore.

If they are created, our fragmented media ecosystem makes it hard to know about them. I only learned from researching this post that there was a remake of “We Are the World” in 2010 in response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti (updated with fusion French and rap lyrics — though the MJ chorus remained because, well, he’s inimitable). I mean, maybe I’m an outlier because I was in a brain fog in 2010 after having my second child but…was this really something that was a cultural phenomenon, like in 1985? I don’t think it was…and it had some major artists involved! I also can’t think of any TV show that is truly a shared national experience (Ted Lasso??). Even the Olympics have become an a la carte event that (it feels to me) are devoid of the kind of personal stories Bryant Gumble used to narrate and that we all connected with.

We of course still have limited political realities that bind us in time and space — I think that a fair number of people might be able to tell you what they were doing on the night Donald Trump was elected, or (maybe) where they were as they watched the events of January 6 unfold on television. We might also tune in on the same day, at the same time, to watch something like the State of the Union address. But I think it’s safe to say that our feelings about these events divide us more than bring us together, and we avoid conversations about them unless we know the beliefs of the people we are talking to.

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We’re consumed with politics these days, but shared cultural touchstones are essential to a national identity and common purpose: They help us understand what unites us as Americans, what we care about, and who we are rooting for. “We Are the World” wasn’t just a catchy song that everyone could sing along to, it was a reminder of our responsibility to others on the planet, and an example to follow — after all, if the richest musical stars in the country cared enough to do something about it, so should we. Shared cultural experiences builds social trust — a belief that we are all, more or less, on the same page…which in turn makes it harder to divide us into “us v. them.”

I’m now over 50 so maybe this is all one big “Back in my day…” rant. But I don’t think I’m just imagining this. We have really lost something — but that doesn’t mean we can’t get it back. I’m just not sure what that would look like, today, but I’ll leave you with this as inspiration, which always leaves me feeling (slightly) better about the world:

Discussion questions:

1. I realize the examples I have listed in this post are coming from a Gen X perspective. What cultural touchstones defined your generation? (And if you are a Millennial or younger, do you believe you still have them?)

2. What were the effects of the cultural touchstones you described in Question 1? For example, did they spark a national conversation, appeal to a shared identity, or generate an emotional response? What impact did they have on your sense of trust in the country, fellow citizens, and the world?

3. Does the digital era and the ability to create individual preference bubbles mean that such shared cultural experiences are no longer possible? Is there a way to leverage the digital sphere to generate more of them?

1. The great thing about this is that I am basically a tabula rasa so I can adapt, chameleon-like, to whatever team the people around me are rooting for.