In the first episode of the show “Footnote” which is entitled “Belong” the show asks the question, “How many friends do we have?” They write: “That question is getting complicated. It depends on who’s asking, and what exactly they mean by friends. Strictly speaking, we have lots of friends. Never has the world been more connected than it is now. We are, constantly, connected to a brain-bursting amount of people – work contacts, distant family members, old high school friends, even people we don’t like that much. By the popular definition, most of us have hundreds of friends. And yet, the current generation is being called history’s loneliest. Friendship’s biggest prize, acceptance, remains the Holy Grail – desperately sought and rarely found. When you strip away our online followers, our smart phone contacts, our social networks, what are we left with? How do we just belong?” In the episode they picked one city and found three stories there of how people found acceptance – and the final story of the three is about hooping. Check it out: Belong
The Hoop Jam piece is quite beautiful, but I have to say that the banjo story has really stuck with me too. Maybe I’m going to have to go to Pittsburgh and see it for myself one of these days.