A new generation is insisting that mental health be part of the national conversation, and many voices - among them women and people of color - are increasingly offering new alternatives to the old myths. Let's not consign Americans to be the heirs of a built-in loneliness gene, though. Fueled in part by pandemic distrust, a latter-day strain of individual-over-community sentiment often paired with invocations of liberty and freedom occupies a significant chunk of the national conversation these days - to the point where advocacy about community thinking is sometimes met with accusations of socialism. Some of the biggest stories of cooperation - the rise of municipal organizations and trade unions, the New Deal programs that helped drag many Americans out of the Depression in the 1930s, war efforts from the Civil War to World War II - sometimes get lost in the fervor for character-driven stories of individualism. Yet many frontier myths skip over how important community has been in the settling and growth of the nation. “There’s this idea that going out into those vast spaces and connecting with the wilderness and escaping the past was precisely what made us Americans," Woodard says. And in many countries that’s more true than it was in the United States,” says Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. They were tied up in a web of connections. In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. This has been a recurring thread in how Americans perceive themselves. throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” “Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it. “They acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands,” he wrote. Or is that, like other chunks of the American story, a premise built on myths?Īlexis de Tocqueville, watching the country as an outsider while writing “Democracy in America” in the mid-1800s, wondered whether, “as social conditions become more equal,” Americans and people like them would be inclined to reject the trappings of deep community that had pervaded Old World aristocracies for centuries. But as far back as the early 19th century, when the word “loneliness” began to be used in its current context in American life, some were already asking the question: Do the contours of American society - that emphasis on individualism, that spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape - encourage isolation and alienation? When you add recent stressors - the rise of social media and virtual life, post-9/11 polarization and the way COVID-19 interrupted existence - the challenge becomes even more stark. He cited some potent forces: the gradual withering of longstanding institutions, decreased engagement with churches, the fraying bonds of extended families. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows," he said, “and that’s not right.” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it an American epidemic, saying that it takes as deadly a toll as smoking upon the population of the United States. In reality, loneliness in America can be deadly. It's a classic example of a fundamental American tall tale - that of a nation built on notions of individualism, a male-dominated story filled with loners and “rugged individualists” who suck it up, do what needs to be done, ride off into the sunset and like it that way. As the closing music swells, Wayne's character looks around at his kin - people who have other people to lean on - and then walks off toward the dusty West Texas horizon, lonesome and alone. NEW YORK (AP) - At the end of “The Searchers,” one of John Wayne’s most renowned Westerns, a kidnapped girl has been rescued and a family reunited.
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