With each ‘improvement,’ we’re losing family and community

By David McElroy · September 15, 2014

One of my neighbors died two weeks ago today, but I didn’t know about it until a few hours after he was buried — four days later.

I’d lived across the street from William for many years. He’s cut my grass several times. I’ve given him rides to the store. I’ve chatted with his wife, Anna, and him when I’ve bumped into them at the grocery store. Every now and then, he would come over as I was getting home, just because he wanted someone to talk with.

So why did it take me so long to find out that William had died? And what does this imply about modern communities?

Every indication I see or read says that communities haven’t been as strong for the past couple of generations as they once were. Those same decades have been filled with incredible advancements in our living standards and options about life. Could it be that the choices we’ve been making are filled with tradeoffs that we’re not entirely sure we’re making? I suspect so.

At one time, the people in communities and neighborhoods had to know one another, because they were all they mutually had. They didn’t have cars to drive to places across a city or state. They spent most of their time within a short distance of home.

They stayed outside more, because it wasn’t that long ago when normal people didn’t have air conditioning. (And it wasn’t too many years before that when air conditioning didn’t exist. I don’t know how people lived in the South at the time.) Children played outside. Adults worked outside and they sat around on porches and talked when they weren’t working.

There were no televisions to take their attention. There were no computers or video game systems. Facebook certainly didn’t exist. Neither did all the other electronic devices around which we build our lives today.

People were forced to interact more closely with those right around them — for good or for bad.

A few people still live that way today. For instance, the Amish still reject modern conveniences. I used to believe that they believed such modern devices were evil, but I’ve come to understand that it’s simply a conscious decision that modern conveniences take a person’s eyes off the values and lifestyle that they believe makes people more virtuous and happier. Could they be right?

I don’t want to live as the Amish do, but they still have a sense of community that’s almost unheard-of elsewhere. Take a look at the time-lapse video below of one of their famous barn-raisings, this one in Ohio. They still know each other and work together. They certainly have crime and they’re not perfect, but there are attractive things about the results they get.

And what about us?

Most of us don’t know many of our neighbors. The ones we know tend to be shallower ties other than rare exceptions. We spend most of our waking hours many miles from our neighborhoods. When we return to our neighborhoods, we go into sealed homes of our own. Most people flip on televisions and computers and gaming devices and enter worlds far from the people around us.

Those rare children who still play outside unsupervised — which was common even a few decades ago in most places — are now treated as though they’re doing something unsafe. Parents are sometimes even threatened. The lesson? Go back inside. Watch television. Play video games. Send pictures of yourself on Snapchat. Stay inside your nice, safe walled-off prison.

I’d already been thinking a lot for the past few months about community, even before William died. I’ve found myself yearning for something different from what we experience today, even though I don’t want to go as far back as what the Amish have instituted. Is there a middle ground?

Whoever said we can have it all was lying to us. We can’t have all of the things we consider part of modern life and still have the communities that some of us crave. All of these things are tradeoffs, and different ones of us are going to make different choices about those tradeoffs. But shouldn’t we be aware of what we’re giving up in exchange for the changes we’ve so eagerly accepted into our lives?

At this point, I suspect that most people would make the choice to stay with the neighborhoods that I consider to be cold and antiseptic. There’s nothing wrong with that if it’s their choice. But aren’t there some of us who want something more? Aren’t there some of us who are interested in making some conscious, intentional choices to recover some ways of being communities — and ways of living family life — that most people have left behind?

I’ve always believed that churches were groups of people who met together because they shared identical (or very similar) beliefs, but I recently encountered the idea that this hasn’t always been the case. In a thought-provoking radio documentary on Canada’s CBC show, Ideas, a scholar of religious history and literature argues that religions traditionally had more to do with community than what the people specifically believed. I don’t agree with everything in the documentary, but it gave me some new things to think about. I recommend it.

(Viewed in this way, Pascal’s Wager makes sense. If your choice is about participation in a community — rather than what to believe — his argument makes sense. Viewed through a modern lens of belief, it was nonsensical that you could choose what to believe.)

What if we established intentional communities — groups which wanted to build a sense of community around shared ways of life and practice? Would we end up with more well-adjusted children? Would we have adults who were more emotionally healthy and less unhappy and depressed? Would we have closer families — parents and children who knew each other and loved each other more than their TVs and computers and Xboxes?

I can’t say for sure, but I suspect so.

The only thing I can say for sure is that I’m struggling to understand what a community really is. I think most of us have lost sight of it today. I love a lot of what modern technology and modern choices have given us — and I have no intention of giving up my MacBook and my iPhone — but I have a strong feeling that I’ve lost a lot of the human connection that I so desperately find myself needing and wanting.

I think we need to examine our choices. I think we need to make some hard choices. I gave up television years ago. Would it be better if I gave up Facebook? Would it be better if I found people who shared my ideas about possibly building different sorts of neighborhoods — and intentionally chose to build something new with them?

I don’t know. But as I consider the fact that a man who lived across the street from me for years can be dead and his body in the ground four days later before I know about it, I think something is wrong.

I want community. I want human contact. I also want the conveniences of modern life. But I’d like to be more serious and intentional about weighing the choices — and not just accepting every change that technology and popular culture give to me.

Progress can be great, but we can lose sight of what’s important. I want to re-evaluate what’s important to me. I have some long-term changes I need to make.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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