Our world is a fractured and broken place…….
Ya know, even though we’ve got lots of cool communications technology on the planet these days and it seems as though it should be getting easier and easier to build something I’ll call “community”, it is somewhat ironic that there is less and less of it all the time. Sure, there are communities of all sorts on the world wide web – everybody’s joining all sorts of stuff that’s floating around out there in cyberspace. But I’ll tell you – it’s a poor excuse for real community.
When I was a kid growing up in Hanover, and even when I got older and was out on my own, small towns were filled to overflowing with all sorts of community. When I was actually growing up, both sides of my extended family lived in Hanover and I saw aunts and uncles and cousins all the time just as I went about my daily travels in life. I think that type of upbringing, sort of in the bosom of a loving family, is really important. Goes a long way toward determining how you fare in life later on.
When I first moved to Wallaceburg 35 years ago, there were about 70 community organizations in town. There was Rotary and Kinsmen and Jaycees and Lions and two IODE Chapters and the list just went on and on….today, I think you’d be really lucky to find 10-12 community organizations in Wallaceburg. They’re pretty well all gone and gone with them are the many, many things they used to do to improve and better the town and to make it a great place to raise kids and enjoy life.
No, we got zillions of ways to keep in touch these days and we’ve got the great world wide cyberworld, but our societies are fractured and splintered beyond belief – not just politically, but in every way possible. Remember when there were just a few TV networks. Huge swaths of society watched basically the same stuff. So, the day after a Sunday night episode of Ed Sullivan, almost everybody was talking about it at work or school or wherever. Today, in a land totally crammed full of something called “streaming services”, almost nobody watches the same thing.
For example, I was not a fan of the “hit” show Breaking Bad. Watched part of a couple of episodes and generally felt it was morally depraved, but it was supposedly a really big hit of a show….somewhere along the line, I saw in the media that about 4 million viewers watched the final installment of it. That sounds like a lot of people until you realize that about 40 million people watched the final episode of MASH back in the olden days. TV and movieworld have been shattered into about 8 billion pieces, so that it’s almost impossible to get a really huge market share. The Disney streaming service, by the way, just reached 100 million subscribers, but I’m pretty sure not everybody’s watching everything and most people join to watch certain isolated shows….maybe Star Wars or Marvel or stuff like that. Also by the way, I heard a commentator last week say the average household should spend $130 on streaming services every month if they want to get enough stuff…..yikes!
The point I’m trying to make is that even though we are moving forward at light speed in certain areas of our lives, like technology, some of the most important things in our lives are being left by the wayside. I’ve heard a lot of media stories about our current generation of young people and how emotionally frail many of these folks are. And I really think that has a lot to do with the level of safeness and security these young people feel in their lives as they grow up. There are many single parent households these days and it is somewhat rare for kids to be surrounded by extended family as they come of age. Many, many people these days are fundamentally on their own as they pass through life. And life can be a scary place – for sure.
Somehow, the whole planet and everyone on it needs to start to pull in the same direction. And we need each other to do that. The way our societies are evolving, I wouldn’t be surprised if we all end up living and dying in tiny off-white cubicles without any human interaction – because that seems to be where we’re headed….and then if you mix in the odd pandemic just for good measure…..and here we are….alone again, naturally…..