I live in a great neighborhood – a place on the edge of a little city, where suburbia kind of meets the rolling hills of the Upstate countryside. It's not just the place we like, though; it’s the people, too. One neighbor brings in our mail and newspapers when we’re away, and we water the plants for the folks next door while they travel. Since we’re on a corner lot, all the dogs stop by to play with our friendly mutt, Roscoe – and that has yielded inter-generational friendships among the pups’ human families. We’ll have a neighborhood picnic across the way on the first day of summer; I’ll set up a croquet course and a badminton net, and another neighbor will fire up the grill for burgers and hot dogs.
We know that we’re lucky: A just-released Pew Research Center study finds that only a quarter of Americans say they know all or most of their neighbors, and just 44 percent say they trust those they know. It’s not a new phenomenon, this who’s-my-neighbor notion, but the data shows that a decline in human connections has continued across our society for decades.
Two years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General reported that half of Americans are afflicted by the loneliness that tends to follow social isolation, which raises their risk of premature death by 29 percent — meaning that the impact of loneliness is similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia, the report said, and it’s expensive: Social isolation accounts for an extra $6.7 billion in Medicare spending each year.
Our government won’t do anything about that just now, of course, because the warning about the toll of social isolation was issued in the Before Times — that is, before the federal government was placed into the hands of an administration and a Congress that is more concerned about enhancing the assets of the wealthy than protecting the health of the ordinary. Does anybody who doesn’t own a red MAGA cap think that the work of this Congress and administration won’t lead to more distress and instability in a population that is already hurting?
And there is even greater need among those beyond America’s borders, whose cries for help America increasingly meets with a shrug. Oxfam has estimated that the cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development alone will mean that 23 million children will lose access to education and as many as 95 million people will lose basic health care, potentially leading to more than 3 million preventable deaths each year.
We don’t know those people, though — nor, apparently, do we care to. We seem to think that they’re not our neighbors.
You cannot blame the isolation of Americans on Donald Trump, of course; the trend of loneliness predates his golden escalator glide into politics. In fact, Trump may be the ultimate product of our disconnectedness from each other: People who feel alienated from their neighbors and their society are surely more likely to embrace a go-it-alone political philosophy laid out by someone who postures as a tough guy.
And so he leads us further away from the global connections and the care for one another that sustain our nation as surely as personal connections sustain us individually. It is an attitude that speaks of a whole society tumbling into deeper isolation from the world, placing the nation itself on a trajectory toward risk no less acute than the growing personal isolation imperils individuals.
We know what can help people who are feeling isolated. Mental health experts suggest that we can reach out to help bring people together to share experiences of art, music, the outdoors, history, sports, culture and religion — the sort of things that make us human. We can encourage the lonely among us to connect with people who share their interests. We can be more present in their lives.
But what of whole societies that are slipping into isolation? That’s why we need to step in to strengthen the connections that are being imperiled by this administration. I’m talking about support for local arts organizations and community groups; about programs that help people in need that our government is abandoning; and, yes, about sustaining this community of public media. Likewise, we have to insist that America not shirk its role in the world, as the globe’s leading economy. Our dollars and our energies need to be directed toward being, well, good neighbors.
Americans have always tended to believe and hope for the best. That Pew survey I mentioned found that three-quarters of us would bring in the mail or water plants for out-of-town neighbors, that almost the same number would conserve water or electricity if a public official asked them to do so, and two-thirds would bring a meal to a sick neighbor.
That sounds like the kind of people we Americans still aspire to be, even if our leaders are more selfish, less kind, less neighborly. We just need more of the kind of neighborhood that kids who watched public TV for a generation would find familiar – that is, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers used to often say, “Look for the helpers.” He said, “You will always find people who are helping.” We have to hope that is true, still, and to understand that now, especially, those people must be us.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.