In the safe harbor of each other’s company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things.

–Toni Morrison

Friendship lacks exact parameters. Like love, it can ignite right away or boomerang into you, someone you first tried to escape coming back to you as a pal. Like the hoods–sisterhood, brotherhood–friendship strengthens under duress and over time, yet no tribe of friends counts for much if to it you can automatically belong. While common interest and shared temperament help, these do not determine who we become friends with, or how.

A person you live near whom you know only by face is still your neighbor, even if you prefer the person with whom you speak whenever you pass each other on the street. “Neighbor” defines proximity first, behavior, second. Not so with “friend.”

Lovers occupy their own country together, a private realm. Behind those borders no one can ever guess exactly what takes place. And a one night stand confirms that love may have nothing to do with the bodily acts associated with making it.

But friends take comfort in living across each other’s boundaries and do so, as often as not, as their way of being out in the public world. An acquaintance points out how ratty my hair looks or how I never learned to cook or any of the foibles of my being and I cringe and want to hide. A friend does this and I feel them honoring my oddities or failures, reaffirming my status, their public bolster–even in a tease–a lift to my private self.

Did not the internet before this pandemic befoul our definition of “friend”? How did we come to believe mutual inter-relatedness and affection might be consummated with a click? Sure, friends discover one another and hold fast through emails and texts. That’s a boon and proves physical presence is not mandatory to become besties. But to think that because you and I both access the same social media platform we are now friends ghosts the essentials of the word’s meaning. Facebook conflated friend-worthy–which we all are–with friend, which only a select and delicious bunch can ever be.

Who we choose as our friends and who we end up being friends with is as distinct and leathered as our signature or our smile. Those who stake their spirit and concerns and peculiarities to our own sanctify friendships ground through happenstance and chance, not despite them. Algorithm? Friendship defies it. Like personality at its fullest and most alive, friendship shall not bow down to a pre-programmed notion others mete out. You and me bud, against the world.

As an economic scheme, Facebook’s conflation of friend-worthy with friend was a bonanza. As a global step towards conceding sacred territory in the brain and the heart where friendship lives and where essence bonds to essence that conflation was a vice.

To be sure, humans have always been spectacularly good at forgetting the fibers that hold us together, at dismissing the ropes that pull us towards one another or bind us up as a community, a global village. Greed and avarice, militarism and materialism, people eviscerated in the name of a flag, an ideology, an economic theorem, or because of today’s sect of the self-righteous . . . it all predated Facebook. But this is also a reminder that countries and economies and religions rarely act in history as well as we do in the day to day with our best friends.

If only it were otherwise.

It may seem a non-sequitur, but I suggest as a start the kinds of meetings the G20 holds (when and if we can ever return to real physical space) be conducted in local cafes or a public park. If one problem with Facebook is the belief we are all friends rather than friend worthy, one problem with leadership is the presumption distinction comes from position rather than character, performance, and behavior. Limousines and private planes and these G20 meetings held in ever more remote locations (as they were in the decade of Facebook, that decade before this era of Corona) may have been deemed necessary because of security, but part of the reason leaders are not safe on the subway is because they never ride it. If every world leader had to use public transportation, send their kids to public school, and depend on public healthcare, such systems would not be left to languish and decay until they are one virus short of collapse.

As it happens, in today’s NY Times, Jennifer Senior claims that while Trump “was selected and celebrated precisely for his gleeful assault on norms . . . he has been remarkably hesitant to help establish a new way of life,” shaking hands until recently, refusing to wear a mask, struggling to distance himself physically. “Having the strength to establish new norms is another cognitive requirement to lead during a crisis,” Senior writes.

Originality, free-spirit, going against the grain–those things friendship builds–look absent in the figures one associates with Mr. Trump: Miss Conway, for instance, Roger Stone, Mayor Giuliani, Secretary Mnuchin. The grotesque masks they may see in the mirror as distinctive does not convey, in public at least, self-evident friend-worthy-ness. But more to the point of linking the unique bonds of friendship to the qualities we need now, these folk show no signs they bond as friends, either with Mr. Trump or with each other, despite all this time shared on the stage of leadership. Which is just a long way of asking: Who are Mr. Trump’s friends?

Anyone, Sir? Any soul you would select without your hardcoded binaries of rich over not, strong and never weak, not disgraceful as defined by your lack of grace? Anyone you’ll endorse outside these terms, Sir? A chum whose worthy in a fashion only he and you share?

If friends help you concentrate on your own perception of things, as Morrison suggests, and one kind of cognitive strength we need in crises is establishing new norms, then algorithm-less friends point to our chance to survive as much as they do the quality of our leaders.

A claim for now and a tad of foreshadowing for the next post: citizen.

Until then, stay safe, be well.

–Ted