Seeing the People Passing By

By Alan S. Miller

Marin County, California
May 3, 2005

Barbara and I invested three hours one recent evening watching once again the film of Eugene O'Neil's great play, A Long Day's Journey Into Night.

“I sometimes hear the voices down below, but all the people in the world could pass by my window and I'd never know the difference.”

It's a difficult film to watch and a story familiar to many of us: a dysfunctional family, sibling rivalries, inability to communicate with those we are closest to, drug addiction, an unremitting focus on the self, and the fear of death.

In the film, Katherine Hepburn plays Mary Tyrone, the wife of James (a prosperous but miserly actor), and the mother of Edmund and Jamie.

Although the family faces a host of problems, the plot revolves in part around Mary's addiction to morphine. Because of bungling by an incompetent doctor years earlier, Mary had become an addict—a "drug fiend" as her sons call her.

The saddest scene in the play, I think, is revealed when Mary, in a state of drug induced lethargy, looks out her window at the fog clouded river and street below and says:

"I sometimes hear the voices down below, but all the people in the world could pass by my window and I'd never know the difference."

As the play unfolds, O'Neil suggests that Mary's indifference to the larger world is not simply the result of drugs. It has just been too easy for her to shut out the rest of the world. Everyone in the family has conspired to protect her from reality.

I have a sense that Mary's emotional separation from the world outside her door is an affliction we often share at different times in our lives. We are all occasionally disconnected, I think, from facts we prefer to ignore.

On a larger scale, we live in a world of ongoing and escalating human need. People we should see pass by us unnoticed every day.

Hundreds of millions of children go to bed every night with empty stomachs. Even where schools are available, many of these kids are too weak to attend.

Inadequate nutrition in the years between birth and three years of age irrevocably affects brain growth, learning potential, long-term health and academic performance.

20 million low birth-weight babies are born every year in the poor world. 27% of these children under five are severely undernourished. 34% are physically stunted and below the norms in height and weight.

Eleven million children younger than five years of age—30,000 per day—die from hunger related disease every year.

More than three billion people exist on less that $ 2.00 per day. The wealthy world—the top 5%—continues to soak up 75 % of all the good things the world produces.

The actor/author Wallace Shawn was recently interviewed on Bill Moyer's program NOW. He commented thoughtfully about how we who are the privileged few allow the "trivialities" of our personal lives to interfere with our ability to really connect with those who need our help.

"The quality of American life has undergone a deterioration in recent decades. It is as if our history were being authored by a 3rd rate writer rather than by a master. It is as if we were all compelled to follow the plot of a bad comic book."

Shawn suggests that there is a kind of moral fog that clouds our vision and enables us to see only that which we wish to see. Were it not for the psychological screens we erect, we would not be able to so comfortably live our privileged lives.

We too casually accept national policies that we may morally oppose but which we choose to ignore because active political opposition is so unpleasant and time-consuming.

Presidents and policy makers understand that so long as they can provide most of us with relatively stable lives of comfort and entitlement, they will have a relatively free hand to enact their own brand of oftentimes wrong-headed policies.

I recently had a note from a woman of traditional values lamenting the changed image of America held by her friends during her travels abroad. She said

"Where we were once admired, thinking Europeans and Australians now see us as self-centered and greedy. We're all riding around in SUV's, guzzling gas, wasting natural resources, spreading toxic chemicals, initiating wars and threatening other nations. Why wouldn't the rest of the world be a breeding ground for America haters?"

Mary Tyrone's unwillingness to try to see through her moral fog was partially induced by drugs. That was one of the reasons she failed to notice or care much about the lives of the people passing by her window.

I'm not sure we have such good excuses.

Copyright © 2005 Alan S. Miller
Last updated: May 04, 2005