Claire Romaine's blog

Philadelphia is quite literally larger than life.  All around us on the parkway there were huge, imposing buildings.  They were imposing, intimidating, incriminating halls not because of their size but their age.  Their echoing chambers filled with the history of centuries, telling the stories of the great heroes long past, all bear down on me.  It’s a beautiful and epic place, but the walls themselves seem to demand silence and awe, as if you could somehow destroy the integrity of the place by being anything less than amazed.  The eyes of carvings and statues follow us around the rooms and along the sidewalks.  Their exaggerated size and features look down upon us as if we must feel privileged to walk down the same paths that others once did.  And I do feel awed; I do feel a bit amazed that after all of these years I can be in the same place people once worked and lived hundreds of years ago.  But this is what I mean by larger than life.  Those giant statues?  We can never fill those shoes.

I’ve spent most of my life at a politically and socially liberal school, but until my senior year the politics of the majority of my peers never really factored into my personal life.  It was then that I both enrolled in a political theory class with a socialist teacher and increased my presence on the internet.  Surrounded by liberal people in a left-leaning discussion-based class, I found my opinions shifting ever more to adjust to my friends’ perspectives, and I didn’t have any explanation other than ‘they just made a lot of sense’.  Sunstein, however, explains the concept beautifully.  It’s not that people lose their own free will in favor of the will of the majority, and it’s not as if a person will suddenly abandon long-held beliefs, rather the homogeneity of the group incites agreement in individuals.  The Internet and a lot of social media sites are tangible examples of this process in action.  One person might advocate for increased marriage equality, and, as the original message spreads and others take it up, so often they act as if anyone who disagrees is wrong and unworthy of inclusion in the conversation.   All other opinions fade into the background as a single opinion becomes dominant and “create[s] echo chambers” which encourage even more radical thinking along the same vein.

(just to be clear, I’m not condemning the example I used [I support marriage equality], but it illustrates my personal experience with the concept in Sunstein’s article)

If I knew one thing for certain at that point in my life, it was that we were lost: completely, utterly, and irrevocably lost.  We had been walking by the river for almost an hour, vainly trying to find the pedestrian bridge that would take us to Sawyer’s Point and then across the water.  To this day she still tries to tell me that it was my fault we were lost, while I insist endlessly that it was hers.  All I know is that we were wandering in over a hundred degree heat without water and without the faintest sign of life from anything but the cars roaring repeatedly over the bridge three miles away.  By the time we retraced our steps back to the center of downtown Cincinnati, we were both exhausted, but we still had an hour to burn before we could catch a ride home.  We walked around the empty blocks of office towers, brushing past the meager crowds and barren lobbies.

For the most part, I would hardly call the people in my picture my friends.  I knew them for one or two years at most as they passed through the theatre program at my high school, but I rarely got to know more about them than their names and vague impressions of their personalities.  Still, for every back turned and face blurred in that picture, I could tell you a story about that five minutes in two years that I got the chance to talk to them.  That five minutes has left a lasting impression on my memory.  Moreover, I could tell you about this moment in the picture when the entire room was silent, and each of us closed our eyes while our fellow cast-members surrounded us.  The exercise was simple: match the breathing of the person next to you.  After it ended, I went backstage with the realization that I could trust the people around me.  In an existence marked by fleeting relationships and unknown people, this was a moment when everything stood still, and I did not have a single doubt in my mind about anyone in the room.