I was on a walk with my fiance, and our conversation came around to some of our shared ambitions. One of our prominent goals right now is to make a home for ourselves. We are both young professionals working in a small, predominantly middle and working-class city. People are very friendly in town, but in our first few months we had yet to grow significant social relationships outside of a few work friends. We looked for a book club or something similar to join, but could not find one in the city. We walk our dog multiple times a day, but seldom saw our neighbors outside their houses. Since then, we started a book club, threw a house-warming party, and made a point of stopping whenever we do see people outside in the neighborhood to greet them, if only for a short time.
We have since talked on our walks about what seems to be lacking from much of modern life. Personal ineractions do not take the form that is recounted in family stories, movies, or any depiction of life in previous generations. I feel that this is rooted in a few primary causes.
First of all, the social movements that brought about much of modern progressive thought, including civil rights legislation, has also brought about a notion of valuing the individual over the group in our culture. To secure the rights of every individual, regardless of race, gender, color, or creed required a rhetoric that valued the individual more highly than before.
Second, the modern economic system is focused around a mobile workforce, resulting in many people in our generation, the echo-boomers, being uprooted from our original communities. (One facilitator of the mobile workforce is enhanced transportation systems, most notably in my mind the interstate highway system). This transplantation of a generation is exacerbated by the overprotective nature of parenting that has been all too common over the last 20-25 years. Children are raised, sometimes without necessary skills to take care of themselves, sometimes without a willingness to talk to strangers. How else would anyone meet a new neighbor if not by taking a risk saying hello to a stranger?
Finally, I would cite the rise of large retail stores, again facilitated by the highway system and the resulting dependence on automobiles in modern society, which results in shopping trips farther away from home for larger quantity purchases in a given time - the very model of a big box store. Large buisnesses have less capacity, by their very nature, to provide a personal experience to the customer. They are wonderfully efficient and very profitable, but pale in comparison when it comes to customer attention and service.
Herein lies the dilemma: The greatest generation came back from WWII, and under Eisenhower built the interstate highway system, which increased the access to high-speed interstate transportation to an unprecendented level. The baby boomers rose up and many of them fought for civil rights, guaranteeing the promise the country had yet to fulfill for so many of its citizens. Large retail stores and chain restaurants provided basic goods to the market at prices that more people can afford, resulting in a higher standard of living across the board. All of these changes by any simple measure were astoundingly beneficial to the country. However, they have also resulted in a change in our social culture, making us less connected to each other, to our communities.
A recent publication, "Why We Hate Us" discusses many similar points to those I am attempting to make here. NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93802002) discusses this work also in a recent show, which provided an academic air to this discussion.
Some of the results of this pattern, in my opinion, can be seen in many of the woes of the modern talk shows. Increasing divorce rate, increasing dependence on government-run programs instead of community-based programs, decreasing civic involvement, political cynicism, possibly even school shootings can be tied to this thread in our culture.
I propose, not as an end-all solution, but as a starting point, for our generation to rebuild our personal relationship skills. Simple things and changes in mindset, I feel will go a long way. My fiance and I value each other and our joined lives above our individual ambitions. We support each other and our goals, but everything we do also supports our combined goals. When there was no book club for us to join, we started our own. We value nature, but also appreciate the amenities of city life. I am planning on starting a neighborhood produce sharing program, building a sense of community in the neighborhood and providing healthy, local foods to ourselves and our neighbors. (More about this in a future post) We do not plan on living in this city more than a few more years, in order to be closer to family down the road, but we do plan on making as many positive changes as we can while we do live here. Then we will start again in our new home.
In short - "be the change you want to see in the world."
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