Relational thinking: Start a new project

A world-shattering book in the realm of lay sociology was, and is, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone. I read it quite a while back, but it stayed with me. It's quite hefty because he had to take many pages to prove his thesis. 

Which is: American society has fallen from the world deTocqueville wrote about in the 1830s and which he saw on his famous journey here. deTocqueville wrote many prescient and perceptive things, but one was that we as a people and society are based on freely created associations. It was what made us US. 

This was true in the 1950s. It is far less true today. His metaphor: the number of people in bowling leagues in the 1950s and '60s, and the number at the time of his writing (and now). 

He, of course, shows far more evidence than that. 

I tell my students that American society is far more individualistic now than when I was a child. Catering to every child in a special, particular way is how I see it. In my high school years, I had to walk 1/2 a mile or more to get to the bus stop where all the kids in the area stood and waited, no matter how cold it was (some parents would drive and sit in the car, but not many). In my subdivision, the bus stops at every single house for every child. That is my metaphor: Curb service school buses. 

And we revel in our individualism, while we decry it and say such foolish things as "how much better collectivitistic societies are!" They are foolish because we don't believe them and only say it to virtue signal. We say it and want our custom made coffee drink and high speed wifi so we don't have to talk to the person beside us in the coffee shop, or even at our own table. We want Keurig instead of a communal pot. We want a TV in every room, or a TV in every hand. 

Spending Christmas with an Hispanic family, I saw a different perspective, but they are not immune from the individualism and customized everything after living here. It is seductive. 

And then the temperatures drop, plunge to 0 and we have no power! Where is the wifi and coffee then! 

I am not saying go back to some tribal arrangements. Just start by talking to someone next to us in a public place and by not thinking the other person is a criminal, stalker, or creep. 

[AirBnB, for its faults, may be a way to contribute to this project. I stayed in a hotel the first two nights of my stay. My children wanted me to stay closer to her family, so they booked me an AirBnB about 4 minutes from their home. I had to talk to the host! I had to interact! and she brought me Christmas brunch (quite tasty; I'd never had avocado for breakfast). She is from the Caribbean (I could tell from accent), so that might have been a factor.  It was very appreciated and signalled to me how white, middle class, and disaffected I am.  AirBnb is a community of sorts.]