I spent a year in high school in Europe as an exchange student, and it provided much needed perspective on the superficiality and ultimately the emotionally unnourishing nature of most American relationships of all sorts. Friends are not as close as they should be. Husbands and wives not as intimate and loving as they could be. Children not as respectful of their parents, who for their part all too often prefer their jobs or hobbies to the process of parenting, and are only too willing to outsource it to the TV and other impersonal media that entrance their children, while they themselves do whatever they do at some emotional distance.
The needed connections are not made. Silence is never endured. The threads are never untangled.
I have ideas. I have plans. But the time is not yet, I don’t think. Certainly I have failed every time I tried. People fear openness and intimacy. They fear what is inside of them, and what is inside of them is what WAS inside of them, plus 100,000 murders on the low side, countless acts of cruelty and torture, and a lifetime spent cultivating the habit of being just enough available to kind of get their needs met, without ever going all the way with anyone. And of course if they do, the chances are good the other person will recoil.
We see the notion of “true love” in movies. It is a fantasy, mostly for women. But most of them see it in a fundamentally narcissistic way. They want to be the woman in love, with the good man. They want a beautiful wedding. They want to be the focus. There is not much love in all this. The man can almost be generic. He needs to be relatively handsome, and acceptably successful. That’s it.
To be sure, loving people exist. Loving relationships exist. Fantastic parenting exists.
But should we not make it an aim that that is EXPECTED, that failures should be the exception, and social/community safeguards in place for that eventuality?
I read all the kids locked down now for three months are missing out on valuable time for socializing, for learning how to be a human being. They are bonding with their electronics, learning to “be” with others at an emotional and physical distance. All of this gets “hard wired” at some point. It is fixable, but it becomes the default until major efforts are made to change it.
Where are the visionaries? I try to supply that need, but I am one person, with an obscure blog on a backwater of the internet.
With so much supposed intelligence, with so much research, with countless billions spent every year on making the world smarter, why are we so fucking stupid?