Feeling Disconnected. Holding Politicians Accountable in an Anonymous World

                                        

I feel disconnected.

I feel disconnected from my country. I don’t feel like we’re American’s anymore. I feel like we’re selfish and more concerned with our side winning whatever argument is on the table. Don’t get me wrong...I feel that my side is right on most of the major issues. I’m a conservative. Very conservative. I’m a patriot. Very much a patriot. When I owned a home and was watching a ballgame on TV –even if I was alone- I stood for the National Anthem and sang along, with my hand over my heart. If I’m watching a game at a sports bar I still do that.

There was a time in this country when that wouldn’t be odd at all. But now words like “Tea-Party” “jingoistic” and even “nut” come to mind when people see someone doing that. Why?

Because we’re disconnected.

There was a time in this country when being a patriot, being over-the-top American, was admirable. It used to be that Independence Day was almost as sacred as Christmas, or Easter. It was that way nationally because it was that way locally.

But now we stay inside. We hide behind our fenced-in yards, drive straight into the garage at night, and never see our neighbors. We’re disconnected. We don’t know each other. We are all anonymous. We interact more on Facebook and Twitter than we do  sitting on our front porch, or at a cookout.

When I was a kid, it was almost typical to wake up in the morning, come downstairs, and find one of the other moms on the block sitting at our table, having a cup of coffee with my mother. Not every day. Hardly on school days at all. But once or twice a week, and more in the summer. Or they came over and sat on our patio, and talked while we kids swam in our little pool.

When was the last time you had a cup of coffee with a neighbor? When was the last time it happened spontaneously? Without invitation or planning. Not a book club gathering, or a scheduled meeting to plan the Christmas bazaar. Just a spontaneous cup of coffee with a friend. That’s how it was then. The phone would ring and 2 or 3 minutes later Mrs. Riccio, or Mrs. Messick, or my “Aunt” Sharon (we Yankees have a thing about christening all our parents’ friends of long standing “Aunt” or “Uncle”. It’s a term of endearment. Most were not related in any way) who lived next door would be sitting at the table with my mom, talking about kids, money, broken washing machines, husbands, and what was for dinner that night.

Does anyone do this anymore? Do we stay put long enough to have friends like that? Not just neighbors, that’s a very generic term unless it has meaning attached. Everyone on your street is your neighbor...even if you don’t know them. I mean neighbors who become friends...for life.

I see us as disconnected. As soon as we move into a house we are already eyeing the next one. Wishing our brand new home had this feature, or that accoutrement. We find old friends on Facebook and accept that as interaction. We base our self-worth on how many Twitter followers we have, and whether our latest bit of wisdom –reduced to 140 characters of pure genius- has been retweeted. Readers might laugh at this, but you also know it’s true for almost all of us. We all get caught up in this virtual lifestyle we lead now.

My daughter talks to her friends on Skype. I talked on a phone. In a coat closet. With the cord shut in the door. We went outside and played after school, and saw each other face to face. The adults were tinkering with a car in a garage, or cutting grass, or raking leaves. Now they pay someone to do that for them, and cars are repaired with laptops instead of wrenches.

I don’t dislike technology...not in the least. But I dislike the disconnect we all feel because of it’s intrusion into our social setting.

If you remain disconnected long enough, all sense of community dies. And behind that are the death of civility, caring, understanding, decency, respect, honor, integrity...and accountability.

We are a nation of zero accountability. We have leaders who are no longer accountable to us. Not like they were in my youth. They are unaccountable because they are unknown. Knowing who your Senators are is easy. Knowing who your Congressmen are is easy. Knowing them is lost on us. I mean knowing them. Knowing them because they are part of the neighborhood.

In my book, “Remembering America: Looking Back at the Last Innocent Age,” I tell a wonderful story about writing to our Congressman at the time. His name was Pete DuPont and I wrote to him in the 3^rd grade, relating my concerns about pollution. (It was 1972...we were all into “ecology”) The thing is, I knew who he was. I was eight years old but I knew who he was. I saw him at events. I knew his face. When he got a letter from an 8-year-old boy at Wilmington Manor Elementary School, he took the time to answer. (Doubtless with the help of a staffer) He was part of our community. He knew that when he came home from D.C. and toured the state, he was going to meet people who had seen him before. People his kids went to school with. People who he had helped with problems. He was accountable to us because he was not anonymous.

Look where we are now. We move around so much, looking for that magical floor-plan that will make us feel like we’ve finally arrived, that we don’t know anything at all about the people next door. Or down the street. Or in the pick-up line at our kids’ school. They must be okay...they live in my neighborhood. But I don’t know them. Not at all. We are totally disconnected.

All throughout my teen years and early twenties, when I envisioned owning a home one day and raising a family, I wanted to recreate the neighborhood I grew up in. I wanted my daughter to have life-long friends who lived two houses away. I wanted to have big, cookouts where the whole block came. I wanted to be noticed by some dear people in this huge anonymous world. I wanted to make a few friends later in life, and work on cars, and raise our kids, and split the cost of renting a roto-tiller each spring to dig our gardens.

I have none of that. Few of us really do.

We are an anonymous, invisible, isolated nation now. Slowly –in my lifetime- we have all crawled into our own shells of anonymity. We buy a house, put up a fence, install a few cameras, and an alarm system, and stay indoors. We sit on the deck in the back yard. We have wonderful, amazing neighbors with wonderful amazing stories living right next door. Or across the street. And we’ll never know about them. Because in 2 or 3 years we’ll be moving again. Or they will. They’ll maybe come for dinner once...after three or four years, and almost as many cancellations and reschedulings. But they’ll never just “pop in” with a cup of coffee in hand and sit and chat. They won’t amble over while I have the hood up on my car, just to hold a flashlight while I gap the spark plugs, with no real intention than to just visit for an hour, nurse a beer or two, and get to know each other.

We are disconnected. We are distant. We are all divorced from each other and it renders each of us worthless to all but our dearest friends and family. The rest of the world sees only some guy. Some guy in an ugly car, driving too slow in the left lane so we flip him off. Or a fast-rising executive who sees nobody in the restaurant save his perfect reflection. So he has a loud, rude, animated conversation on his cell phone, while I try to eat my sandwich. If I shoot him a dirty look, he responds with a dismissive glare. If he cares enough to respond at all.

We are disconnected. From each other. From our nation. From our God. From ourselves.

We have been told what we want, and need, for so long now that we don’t really know anymore. We forgot the thing we once dreamed about. We are so worried about getting our kids into the best school, the best cheerleading camp, the best dance class, the best football program, that we forgot what miracles they really are. It’s not that we don’t love them. It’s that we forgot to tell them. We disconnected from them. And sadly, there is myriad temptation and turmoil waiting to fill the void, and connect with our disconnected kids.

Maybe if I had not lost my home, and my career, and my life, I wouldn’t have this perspective. Maybe if I had remained in the Philadelphia area, I would never have felt so disconnected. But then maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it in myself...and in this country.

We’re all anonymous. From the President –whom nobody really yet knows anything about- on down to the folks next door. Anonymous. Invisible. We scream at the talk-radio host and we actually feel hatred sometimes. Hatred for a person we’ve never met. That happens only when a society is disconnected from each other. Only when we are so anonymous that we don’t matter anymore.

And when we, as a society, see each other that way, (Or better stated don’t see each other at all) then we have leaders who hide behind the anonymity and abuse their power. The first abuse is indifference. We see that all the time now. We elect men based on party platform, and speeches, and when they get to Washington they do the opposite of what we thought they would. They don’t represent their electorate anymore. Because they don’t know their electorate anymore.

Because they aren’t one of their electorate anymore.

They are anonymous. They are disconnected.

If this country has any hope remaining, she is going to have to reconnect.

Reconnect to each other. Reconnect to the heart of patriotism whose beat is muffled- almost to silence- somewhere in her great chest. Reconnect to the spirit of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution and the ideals they held dear.

Reconnect to the God who blessed them with those ideals.

We need to reconnect. Reconnect to everything great that made this country great. Or we will surely become as anonymous as grains of sand on the seashore of eternity. 

"The America I Remember" a Follow-up to my Open Letter to President Obama

                                                           The America I Remember

Two days ago I posted an open letter to President Obama. It came from the heart, and it resonated with an awful lot of folks. The response was overwhelming. I had over 500 hits in a little more than 24 hours.

That response got me thinking. Thinking about this great country and what has happened to her in the short span of my lifetime. I will be fifty years old in exactly two weeks. I was born on September 7, 1963. That’s a blip on the screen in the history of this land. Yet, in those brief fifty years, this country has changed dramatically.

I remember an America where stores did little or no business on Sundays. Almost all were closed. It was a day of rest, and reflection. It was the Sabbath for some, but it was respected by all. It was expected that those who’s faith observed a Sunday Sabbath –most Christian denominations- would attend their services on this day. The rest of the community respected this. Sunday was a quiet day. I was a paper boy from age 11 until age 15. I would begin delivering the Philadelphia Inquirer at 5AM on Sunday mornings. There is a sacredness to an early Sunday morning. A solemn, almost holy feeling. The rest of the world was not yet awake, but I was. I was 11 years old, and it was my job to carefully place that newspaper between the storm door and the entry door...and do so without waking the dog, and disturbing the still-sleeping occupants.

It was a great responsibility for an 11 year old boy. I was, in effect, the town crier in modern form. These were the days before 24 hour cable news channels or the internet. The morning headlines, in print form, were the only means for news, with the lone exception of news radio. I loved how that felt. I loved the importance of delivering the news. I delivered the headlines that proclaimed the end of the Vietnam War. I’ll never forget that.

Sunday’s were for family and faith and reflection. They usually concluded with us on the floor, watching "Wonderful World of Disney."  Somewhere in the late 70’s, someone decided that Sunday was an untapped market for retail sales. Stores began to open on Sundays, and before long, Sunday was just another day.

I remember an America where patriotism was the norm. In fact, it was expected ...demanded even. Opening day of little league saw us marching into Stahl Field  (the home field complex for Suburban Little League, where I played) in our old-school wool pants with high-stirrup socks and wool ball caps. We came in team-by-team. The announcer would announce each player and then he’d play the National Anthem on a scratchy old vinyl record on that awful one-speaker P.A. system. For us it was like standing at Veteran’s Stadium, and being announced in the Phillies lineup. We immediately pulled our caps off our heads and held them over our hearts and stood like statues. No one had to tell us. We knew to respect our flag and our anthem. We sang along proudly. We were Americans.

I remember finding my grandfather’s Navy manual around this time. I was maybe 9 or 10. He had been a Seabee in the Pacific theater during WWII. The manual was full of all manner of wonderful information for a young boy. The semaphore alphabet. The Morse code alphabet. How to dress properly in your uniform. The Naval oath, and all four stanzas of the National Anthem. I read it for hours and it felt like I had discovered the Dead Sea scrolls. It was like having a little piece of America right there in my hands.

Being an American took priority over whatever else we were. Nobody hyphenated their heritage. We were Americans. We were proud of where we came from, but not nearly as much as we were proud of where we were. I don’t see that now.

I remember an America where people worked hard and truly appreciated the fruit of their labors. I grew up in a very blue collar, working-class neighborhood in New Castle, Delaware, just 15 miles south of my native Philadelphia. Nobody on our street was wealthy. None of our neighbors were social climbers. They were appreciative of even owning a home. They worked hard, bought cheap, and stayed for a lifetime. This gave the neighborhood character and connection. It made it a real community. People stayed in one place and got to know each other. I lived in the same house from age 7 until age 23. Nowadays people move every 3 years. We buy a house, put up a fence, install a security system, hang cameras from the eaves and enter and exit through the garage door. We never see our neighbors.

I grew up in an America where cookouts meant the whole block was invited, and most of them came. The dads cooked real food on mounds of charcoal.  These days you only know of a cookout on your block if you catch the faint wisp of smoke from a gas grille. I’m not lamenting technology. But there was a charm to watching our dads carefully shape a pile of charcoal so it created a draft and burned evenly. Seeing them somehow instinctively know how much lighter fluid was just enough. Watching as they flicked a wooden match from a safe distance and hearing the “whoosh” of the ignition.

It takes time for charcoal to light, grow hot, and settle into a proper heap for cooking. In those 30 or 40 minutes, the dads would have a beer, listen to the ball game or throw a ball around, and chat. They slowed down. They told bad jokes. They talked about cars. They enjoyed each other.

Nowadays, even the grilles are in a hurry. Cookouts aren't the morning-until-bedtime affairs they were when I was a kid. They aren't the entire-block parties either. Now it’s by invitation only. We have a grille that’s ready in 7 minutes, we eat some fish that we bought at Whole Foods and we drink white wine. Our dads shaped real hamburgers from really fatty ground beef, with their bare hands (that they may or may not have washed first) and knocked back Piels’ Big Mouth beers that cost $3.56 for a 12-pack. They scraped the grille about once each summer. They swatted a fly and flipped a burger with the same spatula. They laughed loudly at dumb jokes. They talked for hours. They were friends...for life. There was a ballgame on the radio and kids splashing in a pool.

I remember when my friend Kevin’s dad died. Mr. Ferraro who lived up the street, and whose sons were also friends of mine, was talking to me in his garage one evening, a few months after Mr. Messick passed. I was in my early 20’s by then. Hanging out in Mr. Ferraro’s garage was a rite of passage on Monroe Avenue. One night we were talking about the block. Talking about how we’d all grown up there, Mr. Messick’s kids, me and my brother, Mr. Ferraro’s kids. Then Mr. Ferraro got wistful, and quiet and laughed softly at something we remembered about Mr. Messick. He looked up and said “I really miss Bill”.  And he had a tear in his eye. These were not men who wept. And so I knew this came from someplace deep inside him. This was a friendship forged over 30 plus years of living in the same place and seeing each other almost every day. You sure don’t see that these days.

This is the America I remember. It’s the America I miss. I think a lot of folks miss it as well. I think that’s why my letter resonated so much with so many people.  I think those folks remember the America I do. We remember an America where we hated to see our country taking a beating, either on the battlefield or in public opinion. We hated seeing our country down economically. We hated seeing patriotism lagging.

In the America of my childhood, I wouldn't have had to write an open letter to my President, telling him of my plight. He would have known. He would have cared. He wouldn't have been off on yet another vacation or golf outing, because he would have come from the same heart of America that I did. And he would have a citizenry holding him accountable. My neighbors would have rallied around me and others like me. I know, because I saw it when I was a kid.  I saw the dads who knew of good jobs, helping the dads who needed a job, to get one. I saw them putting in a good word, giving a referral, opening a door. America was a community then. And that community demanded that it’s leadership do what they were sent to Washington to do. And because we were united, and because we were patriots, and because we knew the Constitution and knew civics...they could not get away with what they offer up as leadership today.

I remember an America where serving on the local, state, or federal level was a privilege, and an honor, and most of those men and woman would have done it for free.  Now, it’s a business. A game. A new level of aristocracy.

I remember a better America. And judging from the amount of response I got to a simple open letter to the President...so do a lot of other folks.

I pray we can get that America back. 

(This is the kind of writing I do. I recently wrote a book entitled "Remembering America: Looking Back at the Last Innocent Age"  While this is not an excerpt from that book...this is the sort of story that fills those pages. Writing became a haven and a shelter for me as this long winter of homelessness and joblessness has dragged on.)