this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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All of these are good points, and good to do.
My fear is that most Americans do not talk to their neighbors , do not sit outside and mingle, do not go to church, mosque or temple, or to bars or places of sin, even. They sit at home, go to work. Back and forth, exhausted.
Two generations ago people had stronger community ties. Most people were still exhausted and exploited but complained face to face about it, to neighbors and people in the community they did not know. And that made all the difference to power social movements .
Something is broken here, in my community and I suspect other places, I don’t know how to fix it and have not seen any good fix proposed by others.
I think with time things will change for the better, but many things have to help
That's been my point for a while now. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted over a year. It could only be maintained because of the social bonds and connectedness of the people involved. In almost every way it is a better point in time to be alive than any other except for that of social connections. In the US at least people are more isolated than they have ever been and their sources of reality/truth blunted.
Social movements and change seem to not only need events and hardships but individuals that can harness and rally people.
There are so many different things to blame for it, but I think cars are a big culprit. They insure that infrastructure is designed to keep people separated from each other. Not specifically or with intent, but that is the result.
Somebody (I forget who) once said that we just ended the second industrial revolution. What they meant was not factories, but people being shuffled about and breaking bonds. In the first industrial revolution, in France and England, a lot of people moved from the countryside to the cities. Here, in the USA everyone and their family has moved at least once, and maybe more , and changed jobs and careers. It probably had more effect on society than the first, once cars and computers and the internet was all in there too.
Europeans were less affected the last generation, than in the USA, because I think on average they moved around less. But with North America being so big, we in the USA are all like a lot of shaken up marbles who lost their heritage, most family (no more distant relations network for most) and are adrift.
I think its natural to shut down a lot of social interaction with so much disruption. Pretty sure any significant, rational political progress absolutely depends on us marbles getting our bearings back (dad joke)