A spring walk in nature is one of the few outings still allowed in the places ravaged by the coronavirus. A stroll through the woods or past the lake can easily avoid dangerous actions such as touching surfaces and illicit behavior such as standing within 6 feet of a friend or stranger.
On one such corona-stroll with my family, I recalled a Johnny Cash song. It’s one he wrote while on a mountain walk.
I leaned against a bark of birch
And I breathed the honey dew
I saw a North-bound flock of geese
Against a sky of baby blue
Beside the lily pads
I carved a whistle from a reed
Mother Nature’s quite a lady
But you’re the one I need
Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood
And you’re the one I need.
Sure enough, cherry blossoms are a wonderful respite from the anxiety and isolation of the moment. Fresh air is absolutely necessary these days. And sprinting down a wooded path is a rare chance for the children to get out some energy.
But we humans need other humans.
We need in-person contact. We need hugs and handshakes and breaking bread around a table. We need smiles and jokes and the leisurely conversations that only happen when sitting on a couple of deck chairs or a couple of bar stools.
The coronavirus has taken this flesh-and-blood living away from us.
“We really want people to be separated at this time,” President Trump put it aptly in a March 16 press conference.
The terrible irony is that we were already separated. And for America’s working class, it isn’t necessarily by choice, making the loneliness especially bitter.
The plague of COVID-19 has fallen on a people already stricken by the plague of alienation. In so many communities in America, we were already keeping at least 6 feet from our neighbors and rarely getting together on the back deck for drinks. Too many parents, especially among the working class, already had no play dates for their children. And before the religious authorities called off shul, church, Mass, and jummah, people were already opting out of worship services in favor of Netflix, video games, and cats.
Johnny Cash’s message is more needed in the 2020s than ever before.
So, here’s the question today: Will the current forced isolation exacerbate our alienation? Or could it somehow provide a cure?
A socially distant people
Ray Oldenburg in a 1989 book The Great Good Place lamented the loss of “third places” — barbershops, cafes, local pubs, sandwich joints — where neighbors would run into one another unplanned. Right after World War II, 90% of beer and liquor was consumed in public, at bars or restaurants or public halls. These days, Oldenburg has reported, the number is below 30%.
Charles Murray wrote Coming Apart about the working class’s deinstitutionalization and concomitant loss of marriage and employment. I followed up in 2019 with Alienated America, in which I attributed the perceived death of the American Dream to the collapse of the community institutions that traditionally have brought us all together.
It’s an uneven phenomenon. America has plenty of very connected neighborhoods and small towns. If you live in a town centered on a church, especially around a few Mormon wards, or a couple of Dutch Reformed churches, you probably find the current social distancing to be an incredible shock to the system.
In America’s strong religious communities, people normally have a couple of church events a week, neighborhood diners where folks usually gather, and potlucks and fish fries on the ordinary week. The same is true in a lot of wealthy enclaves. The youth sports leagues are usually swarming with parents and children, as are the PTA meetings.
This isn’t true for our working class, particularly in this secularizing culture. “White working-class Americans of all ages were much less likely than their college-educated peers to participate in sports teams, book clubs, or neighborhood associations,” Emma Green of the Atlantic wrote a couple of years back. A majority of the white working class “said they seldom or never participated in those kinds of activities,” while the number is one-third among college-educated whites.
If your town’s empty Main Street these days looks bizarre to you, it’s the norm in much of rural America. Main Street in Fayette City, Pennsylvania, was already abandoned before the coronavirus, with only a single newsstand open, across from the rotting and long-vacant “Welcome Center.” Main Street in the average upstate New York town already looked like a ghost town before Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered businesses shut down.
Usually crowded churches in many places across America were empty on Sundays in mid-March, thanks to the virus. But thousands of churches had emptied out over the past decade.
This alienation, by the way, was how we got Trump. Trump won the Republican primary on the strength of Republicans who may be religious but do not go to church. Polls suggest Ted Cruz easily won more votes in early primaries among those who go to church every week, while Trump dominated among those who don’t. When asked during the 2016 primaries “who would you turn to first if you needed help with” various tasks or problems, Trump voters were the most likely to respond: “I just rely on myself.”
Loneliness kills
This isolation kills us as surely as the coronavirus does. “Health progress in America essentially ceased in 2012,” Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton have written. Case and Deaton tracked the startling rise in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths, grouped together as “deaths of despair.”
These deaths have risen dramatically, particularly among working-class, middle-aged men. The effect is so large that life spans have decreased in America since 2015.
To understand the opioid epidemic, look at these facts: By 2017, hundreds of thousands of men had dropped out of the labor force entirely. That means they didn’t have a job and weren’t looking for one — about 12% of the working-age population. This percentage has generally climbed since the 1960s. Economist Alan Krueger estimated that half of these men were on painkiller medication.
Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute found that men out of the labor force don’t do “much in the way of child care or help for others in the home either, despite the abundance of time on their hands. Their routine, instead, typically centers on watching — watching TV, DVDs, internet, hand-held devices, etc. — and indeed, watching for an average of 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job.”
The lonely sabbath
My wife and I are Catholics. We got the news on Thursday, March 12, that the Archdiocese of Washington (which includes suburban Maryland) had canceled all public Masses, effective Saturday. So, I brought my children to the noon Mass at our parish the next day — the last public Mass before the coronavirus shutdown.
Afterward, I met a mother of four in her 30s who goes to Mass every single day, which is standard in certain Catholic circles. As we pondered in the parking lot how unmooring it would be to have weeks without Mass, she expressed hope that losing the ability to attend regularly would renew Catholics’ love for Mass and the sacrament of communion.
She’s right, as far as that goes. The people who regularly go to church, mosque, and synagogue solely out of duty may — in the absence of weekly church, jumaah, and shul — develop a real fondness for these gatherings. That’s great.
But that’s not most of us. And rote attendance at religious congregations is not America’s social problem these days. Staying home is the problem. And this virus will make it worse.
On Sunday morning, my wife and I gathered our children in the family room and put Fr. Dan Leary, our pastor, on the television screen. He had recorded the Sunday Mass in his small chapel and posted it online.
In Fr. Dan’s voice and face, and in the regular words and rhythms of the Mass, there was comfort. And in his homily, there was some insight — and hope.
Father spoke of an African priest who has to ride around on a motorcycle to 60 or 70 missions in order to bring Mass and Catholic education to the poor. Fr. Dan also spoke of Fr. Juan Fernando in El Salvador, who says 14 Sunday Masses every week because so many of his flock live in places overrun by gangs, so that traveling from one neighborhood to the next is deadly.
Fr. Dan spoke of “persecuted Christians who cannot leave their homes.” I recalled stories of Christians behind the Iron Curtain who had to sneak around to attend Mass. Throughout history, Jews have been forced to worship in the shadows or on the run.
Our current plight is nothing like theirs in many ways. Crucially, we know that this will end. Maybe even by Easter.
But it goes beyond religion. Pubs are closing across the country. Baseball, basketball, and hockey games are canceled. Museums are shutting down. Youth sports are out.
Learning about these closures, or seeing photos of empty Main Streets, is unnerving to anyone because it reflects the gravity of the crisis.
But ask yourself this: Were you going to your local diner? When did you last bring your family to the nearest museum? Had you even checked the minor-league baseball schedule? Do you go to the library? The free spring concerts at town hall? The Friday fish fries?
Increasingly, people’s answer is “no.” When we are totally free, when we are not under the oppression of a totalitarian state or a contagious disease, we do not take advantage of our freedom by doing what is best for us: assembling with our neighbors, working together with our fellow men, and sharing our gifts with others while profiting from their gifts.
This is where the deprivation, the weeks in the proverbial desert, could benefit American society. The alienated, the isolated, and the alone are often that way because they do not see the virtue in society. They do not think they will gain from assembling, working together, and sharing.
Robert Nisbet, in his 1953 book The Quest for Community, wrote that the alienated individual “not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.” Totally free to be part of the social order, millions of people have declined to join it.
Perhaps some time in the shackles of social distancing will make the freedom that comes later this year taste sweeter than it did before.
I got phone calls during the first week of the shutdown from friends and colleagues checking on me. They were also checking on others, including widows on whom we all should have been checking all along. Could this become a habit that will persist?
My family, along with dozens of others, walked through Wheaton Regional Park on a pleasant Sunday at the beginning of the shutdown. Families and small groups all kept their distance from one another. But these groups of stranger-neighbors all waved to one another more than normal.
While we have long lived near one another and shared this park and the roads and the sidewalks and the grocery stores, somehow none of these shared experiences were enough to form a bond. Now, the bonds may be starting to form between us, over the shared experience of being separate.
Timothy P. Carney is senior commentary writer at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.
