Lonely American

I met a man from Shanghai, China, we began talking, and became friends. One day he said to me: "you Americans are the loneliest people in the world. You care more about your dogs and cats than you do about each other."

I thought "you got that right."

My Chinese friend went on to explain that in China, people were always in groups, and lonliness was essentially unknown.  They eat together, drink together, they do everything together. IN America, he was obviously quite lonely, and he ended up in Chicago, hoping to capture the feeling of community he had known in his home town of 15 million people.

It didn't work. In Chicago he was just as lonely as he had been in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he had first settled. The problem was not the lack of people, it was the American lifestyle.

The American lifestyle is lonely, by world standards. Many of us live alone, in big houses. We Americans all have our own agendas, we go our own way, and when we get together its is usually for some purpose other than comradship, some purpose which has nothing whatever to do with building community. Individualistic, atomized. Its what makes us great; individual initiative.

I'm a loner by nature. I have heard many of my countrymen say the same thing. I live all alone in a big house, with my hundreds of TV channels, and the internet and cell phone, and I love to stay home, alone, screening my phone calls. Thats the way I want it. I have many friends, but they live all over the country, and the contact we maintain is...minimal. I keep thinking about getting a dog.

On surveys one out of ten Americans claims to like dogs more than other humans. Count me in.

I sit at my computer, talking briefly to strangers who will never become my friends. Across town, my friends are doing....I know not what. Perhaps they do what I do. I'll never know.

I have no complaints. I love being a lonely American. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in a country where people put peole first, and their dogs second. But I know, deep down, that I would never want to live in such a country.