American Society's Loneliness Factor

"All alone: American society's loneliness factor. Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago."

For a number of years, I've had the strongest feeling that America's increasing social loneliness wasn't just in my imagination, but I couldn't say that out loud without sounding as if I was inventing some sort of excuse for my own sense of isolation.

The first commenter at the end of the very short article offers the title of a book that sounds worthwhile.

Do "Health Magnets" Really Work?

Yesterday, Trinamick wrote about taking a trip to the Comstock music festival in central Nebraska. While she was there, she met a health-magnet peddler. In spite of her doubts and skepticism, she ended up buying one. The following story is for her and anyone else who may or may not be considering buying health magnets.

My mom broke her ankle when she was a little girl. Her father didn't believe it was broken, so she was forced to walk on it for about two weeks before they finally went to see a doctor (she said she could feel the bone pulling apart and coming together with each step). By then it had started to heal very crookedly. The doctor wanted to re-break and reset it, but her father refused that too, thinking they couldn't afford it. My mom foolishly did nothing to fix the problem when she reached adulthood; so that ankle started giving her a lot of trouble when she reached her 50s. It was very painful. When she reached her 60s, it finally got to the point where it would actually lock up on her for two or three days at a time and cause her no end of pain. She could only walk with crutches. She told me that these lockups happened about once or twice a month. The doctors told her there was nothing they could do at this point in her life, except fuse the ankle, thus permanently locking her ankle in one position. She wasn't in the mood to allow them to do that to her.

Last year I borrowed an expensive magnet kit from one of my cousins (who used to sell them) to let my mom try one out on her ankle. I figured we would soon find out if there was any truth to the claims about magnets or not. I really wanted to believe in them, but I was skeptical. When I showed them to my mom, she was not only skeptical, she was adamant that they were nothing more than a cheap gimmick. She has never had much of an open mind.

One day soon thereafter, her ankle locked up again, solid as a rock, while I was talking to her. She was very unhappy that she was going to be out of commission for at least two days. I told her she had nothing to lose by at least wearing a magnet to see if it would decrease the pain somewhat. If it helped her a little, good. If not, then at least we could both put them out of our minds forevermore. She argued with me for a minute or two (pain can make a person somewhat disagreeable), but then, very reluctantly, she put one on, just to keep me quiet (since I had gone to the trouble to borrow them for her).

Less than five minutes later, she came back and said, "It's working."

I asked, in a somewhat shocked voice, "You mean you can really feel something happening? and so soon?"

She replied, "No, I mean my ankle is totally back to normal. I can walk without crutches again, and there isn't an ounce of pain."

Neither one of us had expected such dramatic results -- and certainly not in less than five minutes.

Needless to say, she has worn a magnet on her ankle religiously since that day. She has never again had an ankle lock up and no longer suffers the daily pain that she had endured for years. Quite some time ago, she even switched to a cheap ($10) wrap-around magnet (probably similar to the one Trinamick bought at Comstock), and it has worked just as well as the expensive model.

Homogenized (but not yet Pasteurized) USA

On Friday, Kathleen, the most popular blogger in Detroit, Michigan, corresponded with me (and others) via her comments section. My correspondence with her eventually "devolved" to the point where I wrote the following off-topic comment:

I don't do much cross-country traveling. Everywhere in this country is pretty much the same as everywhere else in this country, as far as my observations have gone (malls, strip malls, fast-food joints, suburbs, interstates, eight-lane highways, the same movies in identical theaters, the same TV networks, the same motels and city parks, etc., etc.)... Until gas prices got too high, I did take lots of regional road trips to visit with family and friends -- or just to say I did it (Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and, on rare occasions, Colorado).

Kathleen replied:

You have to get off the major arteries of a city to find the things that aren't like every other city. I fear that franchises are killing the things that make each city unique.

I decided to reply to her final reply with this full-fledged blog entry:

There's Really Not That Much Variety
I agree completely with the franchise comment, so I shall let that go. As for this nation's major arteries, avoiding them is my favorite part of traveling (whether in the city or in the country). I enjoy sightseeing in the original business districts of any city or town (unless it has become the bad part of town; sorry, Kathleen). I love comparing what was once there to what is now there. However, even when I "find the things" in one city "that aren't like every other city," I realize those differences are only cosmetic. Underneath those historic exteriors, the vast majority of American public life is still geared toward the buying and selling of "stuff," or staring at trendy museum displays, or attending the same old "artistic" functions (in whatever format they are presented), or going to sporting events, or going to the same old bars and restaurants. Those are the only real choices in most American cities. Some people (obviously not all people) can indulge in those pastimes for only so long before they grow tired of them. After about fifteen years of endless indulgence in most of those pastimes, I finally became completely sick of them. In spite of that, I continued to go through the motions for several more years.

Why?

Because what else is there to do?

Question
When one grows sick of doing the same old "window shopping" and other "cultural pastimes," no matter how affordable, or exciting, or "avant garde" or inspirational they may be, what is one to do? Should I see a psychiatrist because I no longer like doing the same few things that most other people like to do? If so, then one must first assume that most people have it right, while I have it wrong. I'm not ready to do that yet.

I'll Try to Lighten Up
I didn't write this entry to be completely negative, though. All hope is not lost (yet). I believe there are still two "pastimes" in this country that are worth "an effort": Nature and friends.

Nature
Nature is a major exception to the lack-of-variety rule in the United States. There are very few countries on earth with such an incredibly wide variety of awe-inspiring landscapes, from the melodramatic (the Grand Canyon, for instance) to the very subtle (the Bad River valley of South Dakota, for instance).

As inspiring as landscapes are, though, they are not really a lot of fun to visit alone after the first two or three times. In my opinion, such experiences are meant to be shared.

Friends
I always judge any place I go by the friendliness of the people who live there. My family moved to this location when I was 15. The residents here were (are) generally distant and unfriendly toward newcomers / strangers. My negative reception at such an impressionable age had a profound and lasting effect on me (I wouldn't be writing this blog entry three decades later -- almost to the exact month -- if it weren't true).

Let's say there is a city in the United States that offers a wide variety of retail, entertainment and cultural opportunities. A resident of said city could conceivably remain active almost all the time. If most of the inhabitants of that city are unfriendly, I, for one, couldn't care less how many fun pastimes there are, because I would be very lonely living there. On the other hand, try to imagine, if you can, a town in which there is almost nothing to do except stay home or go to the local "bar and grill" and count the number of tumbleweeds that roll down main street past the bar's picture window -- yet the people are as friendly as one could imagine, and have formed a close-knit, all-inclusive society. I would gladly spend the rest of my life there, if I had a tolerable job at which to earn a respectable living.

In Conclusion
One of my favorite quotes comes from the TV series China Beach (1988-1991). In one episode, Nurse Laurette Barber has reached the end of her tour of duty in Vietnam. She is scheduled to return to the United States. At the last minute, she astounds the other nurses and doctors (her best friends) by deciding to stay. When asked why she has chosen to stay in that hell hole instead of going home, she gives her definition of the concept of home: "Home isn't a place. It's anywhere the people like you, and you love 'em back."

That's what I'm trying to say.

Will the Misleading Never End?

[June 17, 2006: There is an update at the end of this entry.]

Lou Dobbs, whom I respect half the time, finally reported on the highly suspect "irregularities" of one of the voting-machine companies, in this case, Sequoia. He mentioned the "problems" experienced by voters in Illinois who recently used Sequoia machines in the primaries.

I thought Lou's report was probably too good to be true, and it was. He immediately blamed all of the company's shady problems on the fact that they are now owned by a Venezuelan company. It's mighty convenient for Lou that Venezuela is ruled by that "horrible" socialist and "public enemy" No. 3 or 4 or 5, Hugo Chavez (who is no more a threat to us than Castro has been since November 1962 -- after the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended --, only Hugo has that highly addictive magic elixir, OIL, which makes the ultra rich take all leave of their senses, their ethics, their common sense, etc., at the mere mention of its name).

Yep, Lou found a foreign scapegoat to take the implied blame for "all" of America's voting "irregularities." Never mind the fact that those irregularities were almost certainly engineered by the Americans who owned the company long before the Venezuelans had even heard of it. It's also mighty convenient that Lou found this foreign scapegoat just in time to counter Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone article.

Yes, Lou, it's totally OK to ignore the far more serious and thoroughly proven criminal behavior of such one-hundred-percent American-owned companies as Diebold and ES&S.

Lou condemns American corporations, such as Big Oil, all the time, but he refuses to condemn the voting-machine companies. Why?

I think the answer is simple: Big Oil cannot hide its criminal behavior from the American people. We are victims of it every time we pull up to a gas pump. The Mainstream media cannot hide this truth from us. The criminal behavior of voting-machine companies, on the other hand, is supposed to be a secret. We are not supposed to know that we are being screwed every time we use one of their machines; therefore, the mainstream media is duty bound to continue to hide those horrible secrets at all costs -- unless there just happens to be a foreign "enemy" to use as a convenient scapegoat. The mainstream media probably wouldn't even have reported this fact if it hadn't found it necessary to conduct damage control in the wake of Kennedy's article.

Yes, I am just speculating, but the timing is amazing. It has been public knowledge for a while that a Venezuelan company owns Sequoia. Why did Dobbs wait until now a day or two after Kennedy's article, to attack them?

[Update: June 17, 2006: Dobbs' report on the Venezuelan ownership of Sequoia was just the first in a seven-part series on hackable voting machines in this country. He spoke about the Venezuelans again in his next report, but, from what I've been able to gather, he spoke almost entirely about the U.S.-owned voting-machine companies in the remaining five segments of the series. On the second night, I wrote the following over at Bradblog: Wildly wishful thinking: Maybe [Kitty Pilgrim and Dobbs (or at least Pilgrim alone) are ever so carefully -- deviously -- working their way around CNN's neocon censors. Maybe their report on foreign (or at least Venezuelan) ownership of a voting-maching company is merely the trojan-horse method of talking about the electronic-voting scandal in this country.

Yes, as I say, that is wildly wishful thinking. The skeptic, the optimist and the realist in me are equally powerful (or weak), and every day, all day long, they battle it out with one another like the Three Stooges during Happy Hour.]