Andy Smarick has built a career in writing and public service. He is the author or editor of four non-fiction books, and his essays and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He helped start several nonprofits and has worked in eight different government posts, from a state legislature to Capitol Hill to the White House. He's the dad to three perfect kids and the husband to a political scientist wife. He plays blues guitar and chess.
Andy began writing Community Day in the spring of 2020. At the time, much was being made of our nation's polarization, the staggering number of deaths of despair, and the growth of conspiracy theories. These things, many smart people said, were destroying America's communities by pulling people apart. Andy wondered, however, if we had it backward. Maybe our growing isolation and the long, slow deterioration of community--the weakening of our connection to the people, places, customs, and beliefs around us--was causing listlessness, frustration, and anger.
He started thinking more about these issues when the pandemic forced the nation into an even more pronounced era of isolation. Suddenly, already lonely, disconnected people were dealing with remote work, online schooling, quarantines, masks, and shuttered businesses and churches. By coincidence, Andy had made a New Year’s resolution for 2020: to hand-write at least one letter per day for the entire year. Not texts, not emails. But pens, stationary, envelopes, and stamps. The goal was to slow down, think more deeply, and connect with people in a new way. But after 60 days, this exercise fundamentally changed. Covid spread and emergency orders were issued. These letters became an unusual written record of the times and a personal conversation about how to make sense of and survive the unreal events around us. Over the course of 561 letters that year, Andy corresponded with 245 different individuals, learning how others were processing fear of illness, changes in work and schooling, loneliness, and more. Andy wrote about that experience here.
During this same period, America was engaged in a heated debate about--of all things--truth. Our trust in journalists, institutions, and experts was declining fast. Public officials seemed to be playing fast and loose with facts. Individuals were looking for new sources of information, sometimes latching onto explanations that others considered entirely unfounded or conspiratorial. Increasingly, people were unconvinced by studies and arguments, gravitating instead toward stories. We were willing to take things seriously without taking them literally. Though this shift alarmed many--indeed, it could be understood as a divorce from reality--for millennia, societies have used fiction to understand the world around them. Plays, novels, poetry, and myths convey truth about the human condition even though they wouldn't be considered factual. For more than a year, Andy worked on this issue: What are the ways individuals and societies share valuable information without facts and scientific evidence. Why is it that, for eons, humans have used allusion, caricature, fables, hyperbole, idioms, metaphor, parables, parody, satire, symbolism, and tall tales? Andy wrote about his conclusions here.
The result of all of this is Community Day. It's a story about fact and fiction, about community and isolation. It is a story about the causes of hard times, how we deal with them, and what happens when we don't.
Contact Andy at andysmarick@gmail.com