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EAU CLAIRE, Wisconsin — “Are you looking for something? Do you need directions?” A young and totally unknown blonde woman approached me on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire. She might have noticed that I had been hanging around. Actually, I was waiting to be picked up after the end of a meeting and was by no means worried or lost. All I was doing was just trying to figure out where the car was likely to pull up. But the young woman must have noticed my hesitation, those four or five minutes when I first waited in front of the Davies Center entrance and then decided to reposition and move over to the nearby sidewalk.
I don’t know what was more striking, the fact that a stranger offered help without being asked or the fact that another human being was so observant as to notice what appeared to be someone else’s confusion.
A couple of days later, on 6th Avenue in Seattle, Washington, I was studying a map unfolded in my hands, with my head tilted so I could better read it, when I heard a man’s voice behind me. “Which street are you looking for?” The man hadn’t even looked in my face, he was coming from behind when he offered me help.
Then, in the Japanese Garden at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California, a man offered to take a picture of me and a companion. He stepped forward to offer without even being asked.
My first-ever visit to the United States was a discovery not of its wealth, of the skyscrapers, the freeways or the technology, but rather of how friendly and genuinely helpful American people are. Offering help seems to be the most natural thing here; it is not a response, but rather an initiative, even an instinct. If people notice you are in difficulty, they reach out and help you. They would hold open the door of the Starbucks coffeshop when I was trying to balance at least three things in my two hands — a newspaper, a muffin and, of course, a cup of coffee. They would reach out and help me pull out the newspaper from the machine at the corner.
“Don’t they notice that I am a foreigner?” I asked myself. Is it so obvious how unhandy I am, how I am struggling with everything, with all these small new things that make life hell? And then I immediately realized how European my question in essence was.
People didn’t help me here because they mistakenly took me for a fellow American. Nor would they have refrained from helping me had they known I was an alien.
From two different worlds
I come from another world, even from two different worlds, since I first experienced communism and then a Europe in what we call “transition.” People used to hate each other when they queued for hours to buy food or when they were stuck in the always late and always crowded buses. The regime was very apt at redirecting the people’s anger away from those in power and toward one other. But then, on the eve of the new Europe, when the Berlin Wall was torn down, we (began) to realize how many other dividing lines remained between people and between nations.
My teenage daughter, who happened to live in Central Europe, wrote a poem about the people on the streets with empty glances, about their blindness toward others, people with eyes turned only inwards, toward their own egos.
If someone in Europe approached me with the question, “Are you looking for something?”, I would definitely move to the defensive. It is not advisable for an Eastern European to show uncertainty while in Western Europe and to stumble over the small new things as I did all the time in America. This would be a clear sign of being not from that culture and not from that world. This would arouse suspicion and mistrust. As a result, people would rather withdraw than reach out to help.
A giant collective effort
Discovering how helpful Americans are to one other incited me to rediscover the deep roots of my own motivation for coming here. Of course I was interested in exploring the coexistence of individual and society, of individual and collective effort. This country was built as a giant collective effort, throughout which people have helped each other; otherwise its enormous achievement wouldn’t have been possible — the pioneers, the westward movement, the expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
Surviving in enormously difficult circumstances, through severe winters and in untamed wilderness, involved plenty of mutual help. And (yet) the same country respects the individual, admires and even mythologizes personal success.
Communism failed as the ideology of the collective at the expense of the individual, it couldn’t produce collective enthusiasm and collective goals, though its propaganda tried all the time to force them upon the people. Now the countries recovering from its legacy struggle to define a new collective effort toward a better future and a Europe as a whole, and its Western part, first and foremost, struggles to live up to the collective promise called “enlargement” or, in other words, reunification. But everywhere people live lonely and disconnected (lives), disenchanted and forgotten in their hard everyday lives in the East and predominantly concerned with preserving their wealth in the West.
America is probably no exception to the common trend of egoism (and) the rise of selfishness and self-centered attitudes. In his famous book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam depicts the civil disengagement of the new generations. But still, a visitor from Europe like me can sense there are bonds between the people here, that they have ears and eyes for each other and for “the other,” that they don’t move around with gloomy, stony faces. (Perhaps) they have preserved the old instinct of the collective effort. Or they may just view themselves, no matter how successful, as a part of something common, of a community, of a society, of a country. Isn’t the American dream or the American promise (both) collective and individual at the same time, a notion for personal success that makes sense within a great society?
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Notebook
By Elena Nikleva, WPI '01