Refusing to allow ourselves to be isolated can make life much better

"Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere.

"Often, it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.

"When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspicion... love actually is all around."
-- Introduction to "LOVE ACTUALLY"

There's a lot of talk about how angry people are these days, and it seems all we ever hear anymore is folks who snap and start shooting, or folks who talk about the opposition as if it's the embodiment of evil.

I'm not buying it. I think at the most basic level, most people are pretty much the same. They want to do the best they can for their family and they want their children to have a better life than they've had.
They don't want to see people homeless or starving, but they don't want the government telling everyone how they should live.

The fact is, most people just want to be left alone to do the best they can for themselves.


I remember something I heard when I was a kid about how few muscles it took to smile compared to how many it took to frown. Seriously, what if everyone just tried to be happy?

What if everyone tried to do the best they could and didn't spend so much time thinking about whether someone else was getting an unfair break?

What if we agreed that we weren't going to take pleasure in other people's suffering?

What if we decided we weren't going to call each other names?

We don't have to live in a world of hate or greed. We can choose to be generous ... to be fair ... to be loving.

That's all it is.

A choice.

I'm not sure people 50 to 100 years ago were that different, but there is no question they lived their lives differently than they do now.

In 1900, less than 40 percent of Americans lived in cities, and even at the beginning of World War II, nearly half of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who fought the war had grown up in rural or small-town America.

When these same men were interviewed as the war wound down, most said all they wanted to do was return home and live a life like their fathers and grandfathers had lived. It didn't happen, and now a very small percentage of Americans live in rural areas.

This may not sound all that significant at first, but consider that if you're poor and out of money on a farm, you'll usually at least have access to food. In the same situation in a city, you're pretty much screwed.

When you look at Christ's two great commandments, the second one -- love your neighbor as yourself -- is a lot easier when you know your neighbor and he's pretty much in the same boat you are. Your barn burned to the ground? Get the neighbors together and build a new one. Why do they help? Because you helped them when they had the same problem, or you will help them if and when it happens to them.

Love your neighbor?

More difficult when all you know of him is hearing his loud music when you're trying to sleep, or when you catch the smell of his cooking and it's like someone is barbecuing a sofa.

Cities isolate us so easily. My mother had about 50 kids in her small-town graduating class in 1945. She probably knew almost everyone else in her class, either by name or by sight. I had 804 in my 1967 suburban class and I doubt if I knew a quarter of them. Throw in the three other classes and I probably didn't know 10 percent of the 3,300 kids enrolled that year.

That was nearly 50 years ago, and in many ways we have grown more and more isolated. We used to go to the record store to buy music. We talked to the clerks and found out what was new and interesting.

Now most of the record stores are gone. You can buy CDs at Best Buy or Walmart, but the selection is much more limited and even the artists available are represented only by their most recent work.

You can go online and get just about anything ever recorded from Amazon or iTunes, but no other people are involved. You order the music, download it and listen it.

"All the lonely people ..."

We used to go to the movies every weekend. We still watch a lot of movies, but this summer it will be five years since we've gone to a theater. Now it's all DVDs and streaming video.

No sticky floor, no annoying people talking during the film, but once again, no outside contact.

I used to spend a lot of time in bookstores, but they're going away too and most of what I buy is from Amazon or Alibris. I have even reached the point where I buy a significant amount of clothes online, something I never thought would happen.

At this point it's difficult to imagine anything other than a major catastrophe -- EMP or something like it -- reversing these trends.

That makes anything we can do to be more social, more sociable, very important. Whether it's joining a club, getting involved with a civic organization or just going to church, making an effort to bring other people into our lives is a positive thing.

Other people can add so much to our lives.

And we can add to theirs.

Because I've got a sneaking suspicion that if you look for it ... love actually is all around.