The art of sacrifice
The Tradition of Living Beautifully, Issue #60
(Hi! Just a reminder that paid subscribers can listen to me read this essay and others! Press the audio button below!)
When I started The Italian American Podcast nearly ten years ago, it only took a dozen or so episodes before a theme emerged. Among the conversations my co-host Anthony and I were having with prominent Italian Americans, I kept hearing a reference to sacrifice. Not just in the common, well-peddled way we talk about sacrifice when we talk about our ancestors—they sacrificed their lives for us, they sacrificed their homes and what they knew to give us better lives—but in a way I hadn’t thought of before.
Achieving and maintaining the very success our ancestors wanted for us comes with its own sacrifice. It’s not as though the giving up of something to attain something more ceased with them. To become successful in America, to have the two-story house and the winding black-top driveway, to have the four-door automobile and the green, green lawn, you have to make sacrifices as well.
In short, I realized that the whole long story is one trade off after another, and that while my generation reaps the benefits of a more comfortable life from the immigrant generation’s sacrifices, it also pays its own price. That price is a piece of our ethnic identity and a daily, visceral connection to our tribe. We also pay with tension, anxiety and days that are jam packed with obligations, both necessary and unnecessary. The price for entrance into American success is loosening your ties to your homeland, no matter how hard you work to stay connected to it, and it leads to more isolation and a weakening of cultural bonds. The more affluent we become, the less connected we remain.
“First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience,” writes Sebastian Junger in his terrific book, Tribe, On Homecoming and Belonging. “The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.”