Glamanate

Kenosha city has roughly 96,265 individuals. The streets are bustling with cars driving to and fro, carrying individuals from work to home, home to the store, friends to friends, and so on. Sometimes there are a few pedestrians – not often though. Once and a while when passing a park you can see one or two, sometimes more, families playing with their children. It is an average small town, after all, people will populate the downtown lakefront, chatting amongst friends in the copious amount of café’s in the area.  Business plazas teem with shoppers bustling from their cars to the store; and some of these plazas lay dormant and unused as urban development moved else where.

This is not a town where everyone knows who you are – maybe they will if you work at a fast food restaurant or a frequented shop. Kenosha is not that small – but it is also not big enough to be slogged with constant traffic.

Sounds like a description of an average city in the United States, does it not? Perhaps that is the problem. Right now I have no possible idea of the names of my neighbors. I know the guy downstairs has come into Subway and we’ve exchanged “Hey, you’re my neighbor!” And that is the extent. That’s one person I have had the chance to interact with out of the eight apartments just on our side of the building. There’s probably nine or more buildings in Woodcreek.

Humans are social creatures; and yes, we still socialize amongst our close friends – but something is wrong here. Previously humans organized themselves in clans and tribes. They were close and personal in their livings, that also was needed for survival. You needed to work together to make survival a possibility. Look at society now, occasionally in suburbs neighbors become friends – but because they have to. They are forced to live near each other. There still is hardly any kind of cooperative action.

Some may friend our ability to have friends across miles a superb example of how we have progressed. Yes, I have friends around the state, but I still feel this is not right. From the start we begin to think globally versus locally. We ignore what is near our living quarters, we look beyond what we would normally need – because it does not matter anymore. This thought of globalization has spawned the new fad of social networks. Instead of meeting our neighbor, we are more concerned about our friend miles away. We will sit at the computer and socialize to someone far from us, versus those who are near us.

You can call this social, but in reality are we destroying our own social abilities? Maybe it is the evolution of things. Man once socialized in tight knit communities, required this for survival. Knowing those and cooperating with those in your living environment was a requirement.  Slowly we began to expand our living environments, expanding and connecting – cramming more and more people per square mile. Now human civilization works without direct cooperation. A city can survive without one individual communicating with another and helping them personally. A city now survives by an individual going to the store, buying a product, paying the tax. In turn the business pays the worker, the worker spends the money again in cycle. The city receives the tax, the city then repairs the city. The once simplified living structure of humankind has now been normalized to a simple, monotonous action of an individual without social interaction.