One hundred and fifty years ago, America suffered through one of its most defining moments. Over 650,000 men (and not a few women) died, primarily for one of two ideas: Are men (and women) indeed created equal? Or is one man, generally a wealthy landowner, able to purchase another man’s rights? Not from the deprived, mind you, but from another wealthy man?
This is not a treatise on the Civil War, though growing up in the South means that period has long been one of my favorite historical eras. The Civil War had one incidental, but transformative, effect on the nation’s population that I wish to examine here. It took formerly isolated, rural farm boys, North and South, and crammed them together in cities, army camps, on marches in knee deep mud & filth, on boats and trains, and not a few in prisoner-of-war camps, like the infamous Confederate prison “Andersonville” or the Union’s “Camp Douglas,” both overflowing with raw sewage, flies, and rotting meat, some of it still attached to its soon-to-be-former owner. The results were not dissimilar to the plagues unleashed on the unprepared immune systems of the Aztecs who encountered Cortez, or the Native American tribesmen who felt the first outward push of English, French, and Spanish colonists along the Atlantic coast. More than twice as many men died of disease than as a result of combat. Even the “city boys” that populated much of the northeastern US at that time were exposed to massive numbers of other men, crammed into bivouacs, sharing outdoor camps where even outhouses were a luxury. Such was the forced “community” of masses of young men. The ones who made it home, even if untouched by bug or ball, were nevertheless forever changed. Though most before the war had never travelled more than a hundred miles of their birthplace, Maine men died in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland. Texans died in those same states, alongside Cajuns from Nawlins. Irish Immigrants died everywhere and on both sides. The South lost one of its brightest field commanders, Major General (CSA) Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, of County Cork, Ireland, late of my hometown, Helena, Arkansas, who died in an ill-conceived assault on Yankee fortifications near Franklin, Tennessee, reportedly by a Federal ball through the heart or abdomen, his body found stripped of anything of value. These young men were no longer isolated, knowing only family and kin, or perhaps a “next-door” neighbor, who might be twenty or more miles away. Marrying a cousin was not at all unusual, as attested by my own paternal grandparents. One often had to travel 50 miles or more to find anyone past a first cousin.
Thus it came to be that as the fledgling United States reached ever further west, and population density increased, the self-reliance of the frontiersman increasingly gave way to the interconnectedness of the 20th century US. Individuals no longer provided most of their own sustenance with their own hands. As World War II came to a close, millions of servicemen came home to find a brave new world of specialization, recreation, and disposable income derived from factory jobs, finance and commerce, and service industries that just a decade or two before were virtually non-existent or available only to the wealthy. War changed, too, becoming something done by the “Army,” with little, if any, impact on the day-to-day lives of the average American. This could be described as the “Leave it to Beaver” era. You were now close enough to a neighbor to chat over the fence, men showing of their expertise in growing green grass or cooking a perfectly grilled steak, while their wives discussed hanging laundry on the line versus their newfangled “ clothes drying machine.” Your kids got in trouble hanging out with the neighborhood “Eddie Haskell,” but Ward and June knew George and Agnes personally, and if it was called for, would march you down the street to settle the matter or force an apology from their progeny. In fact, pretty much everyone on the block knew everyone else, and, at least in the South, virtually ALL the Mom’s had permission to spank you if you earned it. You tried not to get in trouble too far from home, lest you have to run the gauntlet, with Dad’s belt at the prize at the end. For the most part, kids behaved. Every neighborhood had the usual cast of characters. Everyone knew which stay-at-home mom was hitting the bottle. Everyone knew which Dad was the wheeler-dealer at the office, but who couldn’t be trusted with your garden hose. And the kids knew who the “bad” kids were. Of course, kids back then did most of the same things kids do today, but they at least knew it was wrong!
Any stockbroker, money manager, or fiduciary can tell you, over the long haul, stocks outperform bonds. At least, they did up until the early 2000s. But if you look at the actual graph, you’ll see that stocks were virtually flat, relatively speaking, from the 1920s to the early 1980s. From there through 1999, it was a magic carpet ride! The people buying houses then were getting “out of the city” and into the “Burbs,” The explosion in the housing market ran disposable income through the roof, as your house was now a guaranteed investment, one that could be periodically leveraged into cash by a “second mortgage.” At some point, the negative, burdensome word “mortgage” was replaced by the friendly, even desirable “home equity loan” or the even more flexible “home equity line of credit (HELOC)”. No need to worry, your house would always outpace the low interest rate of the HELOC, right?
But this is not about the Civil War and it’s not about investments; it’s about people, communities, and social behavior. Coinciding with the mass exodus to the Burbs, neighbors became increasingly isolated, kept protectively within their little cocoons, not knowing their neighbors, perhaps only seeing them as cars backed out of driveways in the morning. You got home, opened the garage door, and drove in, all without seeing a single adult. “Home Improvement” reflected this new superficial neighbor phenomenon in the persona of “Wilson,” a pair of disembodied eyes over a six foot privacy fence, with whom Tim has a deep mutual (but often misunderstood) trust. Yet, as close as “Tim” and “Wilson” are, Wilson never leaves the confines of his own back yard. But for a few kids running around the neighborhood, it might well be an abandoned ghost town, albeit one where someone is keeping the grass mowed. When my now-ex-wife and I lived in Arlington, Tennessee (still the best place I’ve ever lived), I knew one couple in the neighborhood by more than a first name, and that was largely because my ex was widely more outgoing than I. Most winters, I would over-seed my front yard with annual rye grass, which made it green and lush year round, rather than the normal, brown, dormant Bermuda grass. Occasionally, while I was out mowing the grass in 20 degree January weather (the downside to having a pretty yard all the time), a neighbor would stop and ask what I did to it. At least, I assume he was a neighbor. Neither of us gave the other our name. He might have been from Mars, with his spaceship parked around the corner out of sight.
As the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, the phenomena of “social media” began to transform the socialscape, and not always for the better. “MySpace” made it incredibly easy to create your own “web presence.” Although graphically inferior, and for reasons I’ve yet to figure out, Facebook soon caught and overtook MySpace as THE place to connect with friends, coworkers, acquaintances, distant relatives, and people you haven’t seen since 3rd grade 35 years ago, and open yourself to an inundation requests (and sometimes viruses) from Farmville, Cityville, Castleville, Petville, Idunnoknowville, and Idontcareville.. Twitter added the instant dimension of making a barista’s lousy coffee, or your child’s night with the croup a ticker item on HLN. I now know that several of my high school friends (what few I had) put on weight and/or took off hair just like the rest of us. And my missionary friend in Albania connected me with the pastor of a small congregation of fellow believers half a world away. I’ve talked; make that typed, more with my cousins in the past month than I’d spoken to them in person in, well, ever.
Which brings us to our thesis statement, born from our title: “A Thousand Miles Wide and an Inch Deep: The Illusion of Community in an Ultra-connected World.” Even though we are connected to long lost friends, family, and acquaintances, individuals more isolated than ever because social media creates the illusion of community without the messy part of having to actually, you know, care. We are connected with more people than ever before in our lives, but we’re connected on a level so shallow that we know almost nothing substantive about people we “talk” to almost every day.
Don’t miss the irony of my use of Facebook and a blog to announce this great endeavor. Nor is this something I’m doing for a class, seminar or anything else of note. It’s just a thought I’ve been mulling over for quite a while, perhaps a year or more. I found the basic idea compelling, and gradually noticed snippets explored by other writers.
I welcome your input, either by comment here, Facebook message, comment on my blog, or email to Steve (at) Spencersb (dot) com. If you’d like to receive updates (I have no idea how long this’ll take, I do still have a job and kids who are both far more important). If you would be interested in an electronic copy of the finished project, let me know. I also welcome resources, anecdotes, comments and opinions from you and anyone else you think would be helpful. I’m not so arrogant as to think I’m right about everything. Wait, scratch that, I DO believe I’m right about everything, at least everything I express an opinion about. Which makes sense. If I thought I was wrong, I’d change.
