Why I’m in Boone, North Carolina Today

My older son is a lucky kid. He’s got a friend from school whose parents are both British, and their family spends the bulk of their summer visiting friends and relatives in England. This year, they invited Owen along for a few weeks, and he understandably jumped at the chance.

A few days ago, I called him from the car to catch up, and knowing they had just finished a few days of sightseeing in London, I asked him what his favorite sight was.

“Big Ben,” he said without hesitation.

“Did you go inside? Did you get a tour?” I asked.

“Nope. Just saw it from the street. It’s totally different to see it in person. It’s so cool,” he explained. “I’m hoping to see it one more time before we leave.”

It recalled an experience I had in college, when I was traveling in Europe with friends. We took a day trip from Rome to Pisa, to see the leaning tower. It seemed silly to me – I had seen hundreds of images and videos of this famous landmark – why do I need to see it in person? But I had the same reaction as Owen. In person, the tower was mesmerizing. There was no way for virtual experience to replace the impact of this massive, tipped over column on the surrounding space. There was no ability to understand the implausibility of this anomaly without beholding it with the naked eye.

This revelation probably feels less original today, on the heels of the pandemic. Most of us had hopes that virtual connection, through online school or zoom business meetings, could replicate the quality and impact of in person experience. Quite simply, it did not. Just like creating virtual connection via social media does not provide the same fulfillment as seeing friends in person. Our bodies are hardwired to respond to real, lived experience, not the experience of staring into a flat screen and pretending it’s as good as the real thing.

Today, I’m traveling to Boone, North Carolina, in the heart of Southern Appalachia, to convene a meeting on the impact of neoliberal economics on rural and small town America. I wrote about the wreckage of America’s bipartisan blind faith in neoliberalism last year, and while I’ve learned a lot of about the consequences of mistakes we made through research, reading, and conversations with stakeholders and thought leaders, just like Owen found in London this week, there is no substitute for in person experience.

Obviously, I see the results of globalization, automation, and the cult of profit (key tenets of neoliberalism) in Connecticut. On Tuesday, I convened a group of religious leaders in Norwich, Connecticut, to talk about why fewer Americans are attending church, synagogue, or mosque, places where many people found positive meaning and identity before neoliberalism (and other forces) started to destroy local institutions.

But I want to put myself in the position of helping to lead a national conversation on the path to build a post-neoliberal economic and political order. My first job is to know what has happened in Connecticut to make people feel more alone, more angry, and more spiritually empty than ever before. But I want to know what’s happened in other parts of the country too.

In Boone, the median household income is $25,000, less than half the North Carolina average and almost two-thirds less than the national average. Good paying industry jobs have left, people are working longer hours to just make enough to feed their families, and addiction and mental illness are becoming more prevalent. But people in Boone are still committed to each other and to repairing the damage done to their community by the bad bets political leaders made on globalization and the-market-is-always-right economics. There are many efforts underway in Boone to help people reconnect to each other, build meaningful lives, and create a new economy that doesn’t look to overseas markets for all our goods.

I could read about the challenges Boone faces and the progress they are making…or I could go see it for myself. So, today I’m heading to Boone to meet with local residents and activists. I’ll be joined by a interesting group of local and national thought leaders, including Joe Waters, the CEO of the think tank, Capita; North Carolina writer and activist Mike Cooper, Jr.; LB Prevette, a civic leader in nearby Wilkes County; Harvard philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin; and Brookings scholar and Tennessee resident Richard Reeves.

I think it’s going to be instructional and inspiring. And next week, I’ll share with you what I learned, and whether I was right that, like seeing Big Ben with your own eyes for the first time, in person experience has no match in the virtual world.