First, please excuse the extended hiatus I took from this blog. Since the end of January, I have been unavoidably swamped with my day job. It is a familiar story, where I was assigned more responsibilities without adequate time to delegate existing commitments. After weeks of digging out, the worst seems to have passed. In any case, I hope to reconnect with you kind readers, which is on point for today’s topic.
Division, derision and partisanship. We are a society divided. More notably, we are a society disconnected from each other. We seem to like it that way. We tell ourselves it is a sign of our freedom, that it sustains our sense of independence and dignity. We are told that individual charity is amateurish and condescending – only institutional charity and compulsory social insurance can be dispassionate and professional. We need not be humiliated into admitting dependence on the good will and mercy of our neighbors or even that of our families. We are not impotent and needy; we are empowered and entitled. We have no need to depend on each other when we can petition government for all of our needs. We all deserve to have our basic needs met. Dear lord, this is America in The Twenty-First and 1/16th Century – Blah! Whatever…
The only word that comes to mind is “delusion”. It is pure fantasy, but today, that is the state of affairs. Most people have an inclination toward such visions of an ample, undemanding society. It is touted as true and good and wholesome. To speak against it is to be deceptive and evil and depraved. Well, here I stand against it. Take your best shot. My motives are only the most honorable.
Pat and I bought a house together last year, after a number of years renting a small house on the other side of Jeffersonville. A couple of months after moving in, we held a housewarming one Saturday afternoon. Neither of us have family in town, but we invited the usual assortment of friends and co-workers; attendance over the course of the day was plentiful. We also did something that, in retrospect, was too radical for today’s standards. We invited the nine households immediately contiguous with our new home to join our housewarming.
Our house is in a well-established sub-division, built in the late nineteen-seventies. The neighborhood seems stable and is home to a pleasing cross-section of Americana. The couple immediately to our right are the original owners of nearly 30 years – long enough to raise all of their children to adulthood and watch a son go off to Iraq. The family across the street has been there 17 or more years, and the family on our left has lived there more than a decade. We too hope this neighborhood will be our home for decades to come. Having signed-on for the long haul, we wanted to be congenial and get to know our neighbors; we imagined they too would be curious to know who had moved, literally, into their own back, front and side yards.
Even if they weren’t curious about us, I thought, perhaps they would like an opportunity to meet and greet their long-standing neighbors. With that in mind, we set aside the first two hours to get to know our new neighbors without the distraction of our established friends. Those first two hours were pretty quiet. All in all, only the prior owners who sold us the house and two of our new neighbors visited. One was the retired husband of the couple on the right, whom we had already come to know while out tending to our yard. The other visitor was the young adult son of the family on the left. We had previously chatted with his father and mother, but he was the only one home when we delivered the invitation to our housewarming. He was bewildered and at the same time pleased by the invitation. He said, “No one ever does this.” I think he attended for the sheer novelty of it all.
I imagine that had we done this forty or fifty years ago, the reaction would have been much different. There was a time when neighbor meant more than “lives nearby.” All I know is that despite our best intentions and high ideals, our so-called “advanced society” seems to be fostering detachment from our friends, our neighbors and our families. We are increasingly alienated, and it is supposedly for our own good. We can be cavalier in abandoning familial and neighborly ties, and maintain our foolish pride that we are not at the mercy of others. We can travel around the world and move halfway across the globe from our families; all of this is possible only through the popularity of institutionalized social insurance via big and powerful governments.
I am told these “advances” are blessings. Why do they feel like a curse?
2 comments:
Have you read Bowling Alone? The author had some interesting things to say, I thought.
I lived for a year in south central Colorado in the small town of Gunnison. When I say small I mean that one had to drive two hours either East or West to find a Home Depot. If you needed anything other than your basic 2 x 4 or a box of 8 penny nails you were out of luck.
Another unique thing about Gunnison valley is that it is completlely surrounded by seven 14,000 foot mountain peaks. As a result in the dead of winter it is highly possible to be totally cut off from the outside world for days or weeks depending on the weather.
In this environment I found a social dependancy on ones neighbor that I've experienced no where else in this country. It was an unspoken agreement between tne community that while we may not agree on anthing at all, we dared not alienate anyone totally. The reason being that my neighbor may very well be the only one who sees me slide off the road down a 5 to 1500 foot drop off into 20 feet of snow. Without his willingness to assist me, I have little or no chance of survival. In fact it could very well be spring melt before anyone finds me.
I found this to be both disconcerting and comforting at the same time. It is however a long held traditional value that has existed quite well in this valley since it was first setteled over a century ago.
Would that there more like minded villages in this country!
PS; Lest I mislead, Gunnison does have an airport, but with the right weather patterns it can be shut down for for hours or even days!
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