The Cancer of Loneliness and the Need to Vote

“But no one in a position of authority showed any interest in identifying or arresting those responsible for the assault. No one wrote down the license numbers of the Klansmen's cars and pickup trucks, and no one seemed in any hurry to call an ambulance.” 1961 

A friend of mine who has been watching the slow decline of comity, collegiality, dignity, and respect in the national dialogue, asked me this:

“For us folks who are feeling trampled and flattened by a group that has no morals, what are we supposed to do? What is the most effective way to respond other than vote? Because right now I don’t trust that system either. I know I’m being a paranoid downer, but I’ll let the process prove me wrong after Election Day, but we may be in for a huge disappointment come November. Or this all may be just fever-addled despair on my part and I’ll be fine in a few days.”

Let me start with what might seem to be a totally irrelevant story. When I was a teenager—13 or 14—I was on vacation with my family on the island of Eleuthera, in the Bahamas. We waterskied a lot; took out a Boston Whaler and fished, a lot; we enjoyed our relative isolation under the bright sunny skies…a lot. And then, it was too much. On the day before our trip was to end, I waterskied for hours, protected by no SPF lotions (they didn’t exist), but covered in Bain de Soleil, an orange sun-tan goo (or gelee, as it was called then) which was one of the most popular suntan products at the time. By mid-day, I began to feel a burning sensation on my upper body unlike anything I’d experienced, and returned to the beach house, where, it was all-too-easy to see the deep burns across my shoulders, back, face, and chest—burns so deep that the skin on my shoulders looked to be melted into the deeper tissues, and my face was swelling bright red. My back was crisped, and my upper chest had red streaks and patches.

A local doctor was called, and, with limited supplies available, he packed my shoulders with some sort of ointment and layered them in bandages. Portions of skin on my face, back, and chest had to be debrided and bandaged, carefully, but sufficiently enough to get me through the next two days of air and car travel home to Nebraska where we lived on and Air Force Base. Memory has, thankfully, filtered out the pain, but I do remember being treated for several weeks until my skin began to recover—though some scarring and traces of damaged skin remained for the next 55 years or so.

Fifteen years later, I began paying the real price for my unprotected days in the sun: basal cell carcinomas (BCCs) started appearing like bubbles on the bottom of a near-boiling pot of water. My dermatologists found more than 30 them on my chest, my back, my shoulders, and across my face. Not all at once, of course, but over time…over 40 more years, and still counting. And those that have been found so far are the kind that have to be cut out, not frozen (I’ve had enough stuff frozen off my face and back to qualify for Nitrogen-Ice King).

One reason I describe myself has having a face made for radio (and audiobooks), is due to the crisscrossing lines and scars that have been surgically etched across my sorry mug for the past four decades. The downside is that the effect is not pretty (or handsome); the upside is, nothing so far has turned bad—no melanomas or worse—and that is due in great part to the skills of the doctors who have spotted and excised the basal cell eruptions long before they had a chance to become something worse. But their vigilance and their handiwork will continue because they and I know that what happened 55 years ago calls on me to be watchful every day, and to submit to a scalpel on a regular basis.

But, what does that story have to do with my friend’s question? Everything.

Anniston, Birmingham, and the Freedom Riders, 1961

A few years before my sunburn incident, on May 4, 1961, two buses—one a Greyhound, the other a Trailways—which had started out together in Washington, D.C., bound for New Orleans, became burned and beaten focal points for the kind of racism and hatred most of us thought would have faded from memory by the 21st century. On board the buses, were 13 men and women—six white, seven black, young and old—brave and scared, terrified, but determined that their Freedom Ride through the Deep South would send a message to segregationists and integrationists alike that the days of Jim Crow and the forced separation of races were not going to be tolerated and accepted as the norm. Someone had to take a stand, and the thirteen Freedom Riders were the vanguard of that movement. Their rides did not go well.

I don’t need to recount here the full details of those fateful 10 days—or even of that horrible day, May 14, 1961 (Mother’s Day), in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, when the Greyhound bus was stopped by the KKK, its passengers assaulted, and the bus burned outside Anniston, and the passengers of the Trailways bus were savagely attacked and beaten by KKK thugs in the bus depot in Birmingham where the infamous Bull Connor directed the brutality from behind his dark curtain of hatred. I urge you to read the transcript of an NPR program, Get on the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961, by Terry Gross, supported by the must-read, “Freedom Riders,” by Raymond Arsenault.

I am going to quote several passages from Arsenault’s book, but I have edited it to truncate the N-word that is fully-spelled out in the book because it is still so abhorrent to me, even as a journalist (or maybe because I’m a journalist), and to use the word here would not educate more than it would distract from the larger point I’d like to make.

Here is Arsenault’s description of the scene outside Anniston, Alabama, where the Greyhound bus had been waylaid by Klansmen, and the passengers were being taunted and threatened as the bus was being beaten and rocked—its windows shattered—on the side of the road:

“Eventually, however, two members of the mob, Roger Couch and Cecil "Goober" Lewallyn, decided that they had waited long enough. After returning to his car, which was parked a few yards behind the disabled Greyhound, Lewallyn suddenly ran toward the bus and tossed a flaming bundle of rags through a broken window. Within seconds the bundle exploded, sending dark gray smoke throughout the bus. At first, Genevieve Hughes, seated only a few feet away from the explosion, thought the bomb-thrower was just trying to scare the Freedom Riders with a smoke bomb, but as the smoke got blacker and blacker and as flames began to engulf several of the upholstered seats, she realized that she and the other passengers were in serious trouble. Crouching down in the middle of the bus, she screamed out, "Is there any air up front?" When no one answered, she began to panic. "Oh, my God, they're going to burn us up!" she yelled to the others, who were lost in a dense cloud of smoke. Making her way forward, she finally found an open window six rows from the front and thrust her head out, gasping for air. As she looked out, she saw the outstretched necks of Jimmy McDonald and Charlotte Devree, who had also found open windows. Seconds later, all three squeezed through the windows and dropped to the ground. Still choking from the smoke and fumes, they staggered across the street. Gazing back at the burning bus, they feared that the other passengers were still trapped inside, but they soon caught sight of several passengers who had escaped through the front door on the other side.

They were all lucky to be alive. Several members of the mob had pressed against the door screaming, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn n---s," and the Freedom Riders had been all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the mob that the whole bus was about to explode. As the frightened whites retreated, Cowling pried open the door, allowing the rest of the choking passengers to escape. When Hank Thomas, the first Rider to exit the front of the bus, crawled away from the doorway, a white man rushed toward him and asked, "Are you all okay?" Before Thomas could answer, the man's concerned look turned into a sneer as he struck the astonished student in the head with a baseball bat. Thomas fell to the ground and was barely conscious as the rest of the exiting Riders spilled out onto the grass.

By this time, several of the white families living in the surrounding Bynum neighborhood had formed a small crowd in front of the grocery store. Most of the onlookers remained safely in the background, but a few stepped forward to offer assistance to the Riders. One little girl, twelve-year-old Janie Miller, supplied the choking victims with water, filling and refilling a five-gallon bucket while braving the insults and taunts of Klansmen. Later ostracized and threatened for this act of kindness, she and her family found it impossible to remain in Anniston in the aftermath of the bus bombing. Even though city leaders were quick to condemn the bombing, there was little sympathy for the Riders among local whites. Indeed, while Miller was coming to the Riders' aid, some of her neighbors were urging the marauding Klansmen on.”

And here, Arsenault describes the scene at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham:

“But one of the white "hoodlums" soon answered for him: "N-----s get back. You ain't up north. You're in Alabama, and n-----s ain't nothing here." To prove his point, he suddenly lunged toward Person, punching him in the face. A second Klansman then struck Harris, who was sitting next to Person in the front section of the bus. Both black Freedom Riders adhered to Gandhian discipline and refused to fight back, but this only encouraged their attackers. Dragging the defenseless students into the aisle, the Klansmen started pummeling them with their fists and kicking them again and again. At this point Peck and Walter Bergman rushed forward from the back to object. As soon as Peck reached the front, one of the attackers turned on him, striking a blow that sent the frail, middle-aged activist reeling across two rows of seats. Within seconds Bergman, the oldest of the Freedom Riders at sixty-one, suffered a similar blow, falling to the floor with a thud. As blood spurted from their faces, both men tried to shield themselves from further attack, but the Klansmen, enraged by the white Riders' attempt to protect their "n----r" collaborators, proceeded to pound them into a bloody mass.”

“By the time Peck and company arrived, the Klansmen and their police allies were all in place, armed and ready to do what had to be done to protect the Southern way of life.”

What happened in Anniston and in Birmingham, and in all that followed—the marches, the flames, the bombs, the mobs, the deaths—in Selma, and in Montgomery, and in Memphis and in Watts, and in Detroit and in Dallas, and in Washington, D.C., and in the years to come, of late, in Charleston and Charlottesville, was forecast by many, including the New York Times columnist Harrison Salisbury in April, 1960, when he wrote about Birmingham, a city Salisbury noted “was consumed by lawlessness and racial oppression.” Salisbury continued,

“Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground, has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state's apparatus."

Again, you ask, “What has this to do with the original question?”

America suffered deep burns throughout the mid- to late-1800s and well into the 20th century. Not just the burns of the Civil War, but the fiery and divisive invective-burns of post-Lincoln politics, the white-hot brands of Reconstruction, Radical Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, the Depressions of 1873 and 1893, the industrialization of the North, the influx and oppression of immigrants, child labor, the rise of the oil and steel and railroad magnates whose wealth could not be imagined by the average American, heavy-handed unions, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and on and on.

An undercurrent to all of this must also be addressed: the poor state of education and the absence of publicly-shared enlightened thought due, in great part, to the dearth of quality schools in impoverished American communities, and the hard-wired religious beliefs that rejected science (the Scopes trial/evolution) embracing Biblical interpretation over scientific and social progress. Yes, it is true that the Land Grant Education Act of 1862 (The Morrill Act), and the Second Land Grant Education Act of 1890 (establishing Black colleges and universities), opened doors to higher education for young people across the country; but neither act had the ability to reach down to the elementary and secondary schools in rural and impoverished America to help those students achieve any kind of parity with more affluent students, and better-funded schools in the economically secure North. Almost a century would pass before an enlightened president and a cooperative Congress would promote and enact education legislation favorable to young students of color and economic stress.

Once again, to return to my opening example of the long-lasting, insidious effects of a deep burn, the longer America ignored the fundamental needs of all its children to learn on a level playing field—or, more appropriately, in equally-equipped class rooms—the longer the cancer of illiteracy and purposefully-encouraged intellectual ignorance had to do their terrible work beneath the skin of the nation, the greater the damage to the country 50-100 years hence.

A Diaspora Begins

Throughout all these periods, the anger and frustrations of blacks, poor whites, the disenfranchised, under- or un-educated and left-behind Southern, Midwestern, and Western rural and urban citizens who had few resources, fewer dreams, and no place to turn, sank ever-deeper beneath the inflamed skin of the nation.

Not all of the South’s poor accepted that fate, however, and many—a large number of black Americans—took fate into their own hands and moved out…following paths north and west seeking better (or at least, non-violent or oppressive) futures. One book in particular, Isabel Wilkerson’s, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration,” addresses the flight of black Americans out of the South between 1915 and 1970.

As this population journeyed away from its oppressive Southern base, those who remained behind found their communities, and themselves, further disassociated from the progressive movements springing up around the rest of the nation.

The four key presidents who oversaw the long span of American history from 1861 to 1968, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, each witnessed the division of national interests and tides of social and economic calamity.

For Lincoln, it was the splintering of states over slavery and economic tensions, the dissolution of national union, followed by the deaths of 600,000 men and boys. For Teddy Roosevelt, it was the overarching threat of unbridled industrialists and their trusts, business-choking unions, unprotected consumers, and threatened national lands. For FDR, it was the punishing effects of the Great Depression, the structural collapse of middle and farming class, massive unemployment, and the rise of fascism overseas. For Johnson, it was the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the crushing effects of the Vietnam War.

Each of these Chief Executives experienced the deleterious effects of economic and social disfunction, which led to political decay, riots, lawlessness, mob rule, and, in Lincoln’s case, Civil War. And it is quite true that all four of these presidents applied strong, sometimes overpowering hands, to resolve the crises they faced. Lincoln did not back away from war; Teddy Roosevelt did not back away from trust-busting and union-busting, FDR went so far as to try (unsuccessfully) to pack the Supreme Court, and Lyndon Johnson had to push back against his own party and find compromise with the Republicans in order to advance his Great Society agenda.

Pointing to these men and their times—filled with fire and fury, greed and corruption—it is reasonable to conclude that what we are experiencing today under Trump is tame by comparison. Even as great a presidential historian as Doris Kearns Goodwin noted in a recent CNN interview that the times of the past were filled with crises unlike anything we are experiencing today, and that countervailing forces of time and experience will bring the 21st century ship of state back on course.

Goodwin's “Leadership: In Turbulent Times,” is a study of Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. If you cannot agree on the stature and impact of the first three, you might as well stop reading here, and go back into your cave of irrelevance; if you are in doubt about LBJ's legacy, you can be forgiven, but a close read of Goodwin's book may well shift your opinion (I've read Caro's books on LBJ as well, and I recommend them also).

In typical Goodwin style (think "Team of Rivals"), she shares with us the very souls, aspirations, heartbreaks, and frustrations of the four presidents who did more to advance America's higher mission despite deep personal troubles and massive social, economic, and political crises. Here is a passage from the book's preface:

"These four men form a family tree, a lineage of leadership that spans the entirety of our country's history. It is my hope that these stories of leadership in times of fracture and fear will prove instructive and reassuring. These men set a standard and a bar for all of us. Just as they learned from one another, so we can learn from them. And from them gain a better perspective on the discord of our times. For leadership does not exist in a void. Leadership is a two-way street. 'I have only been an instrument,' Lincoln insisted, with both accuracy and modesty, 'the antislavery people of the country and the army have done it all.' The progressive movement helped pave the way for Theodore Roosevelt's 'Square Deal,' much as the civil rights movement provided the fuel to ignite the righteous and pragmatic activism that enabled the Great Society. and no one communicated with people and heard their voices more clearly than Franklin Roosevelt. He absorbed their stories, listened carefully, and for a generation held a nonstop conversation with the people. 'With public sentiment, nothing can fail,' Abraham Lincoln said, 'without it nothing can succeed.' Such a leader is inseparably linked to the people. Such leadership is a mirror in which the people see their collective reflection."

I have no intellectual standing to debate Ms. Goodwin’s assessment that we will weather today’s storms and come out on the other side intact despite our current miseries, but neither do I feel comforted by her outlook because I hear the echoes of the same national discord Lincoln perceived, and so eloquently addressed in his remarks to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield years before he would become president. Here is Lincoln at the Lyceum, as Ms. Goodwin tells it:

“He opened his address with a warning that ‘something of ill-omen’ was developing among the people—a tendency to substitute violence, murder, and lynching for the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution. Two months earlier, the entire North had been rocked when a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois, killed the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy. In Mississippi, a group of Negroes, suspected of inciting insurrection, were hanged, as were a group of whites suspected of aiding the Negroes. If this moblike spirit continued to spread, Lincoln cautioned, the ‘good men, men who love tranquility, would become alienated from a government too weak to protect them. The country would then be vulnerable to the imposition of order from above.

“While the ambition of the hallowed framers has been ‘inseparably linked’ with building up a constitutional government allowing the people to govern themselves, he feared that in the chaos of moblike behavior, men of the likes of ‘an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon’ would likely seek distinction by boldly setting themselves ‘to the task of pulling down.’ Such men of ‘towering’ egos, in whom ambition is divorced from the people’s best interests, were not men to lead a democracy; they were despots.”

Kearns continues, “To counter the troublesome ambition of such men, Lincoln called upon his fellow Americans to renew the framers’ values and to embrace the Constitution and its laws. ‘Let reverence for the laws be breathed y every American mother’ taught in every school, preached in every pulpit. The great bulwark against a potential dictator is an informed people ‘attached to the government and laws.’ This argument takes Lincoln back to his first statement to the people of Sangamon County when he spoke of education as the cornerstone of democracy. Why is education so central? Because, as he said then, every citizen must be able to read history to ‘appreciate the value of our free institutions’.”

Unlike Lincoln and the Roosevelts (and even Lyndon Johnson and Nixon, for whom riots, bombings, campus gunfire, and social warfare dogged them in the 60s and 70s), Trump is not reacting to destructive forces outside the White House; rather, he appears to be encouraging the resurgence of slowly metastasizing destructive forces from his position within the White House—he is not addressing great national ills with the medicines of care and assurance; he is injecting selective sectors of the nation with strains of cancers we have seen and fought before.

Post-World War II

The America of the 50s and 60s saw a diaspora of white and black families moving away from traditional urban nuclear units as more children left to go to colleges, young professionals sought employment far from their hometowns, and older couples, unburdened with children, also began to relocate. The creation of the suburbs or housing tracts (the spread of Levittowns, for example) in the post-World War II era, aided by the GI Bill which offered housing assistance and higher education opportunities for millions of veterans, coupled with the development and completion of the Interstate Highway System unshackled families from the traditional dinner-table model and cast young and old, white and black, low- and middle-income earners alike out across the country. The American melting pot was getting stirred by countervailing forces—the extroverted force of society’s needs to expand horizons and seek new opportunities, was pulling against the introspective force of the human need for stability, family unity, and low personal risk.

As the ingredients of multiple cultures, racial divides, unequal educations, scattershot aspirations, and unbalanced economies began to collide, rebound, collide again, the old guard of the South, and those politicians and citizens who felt threatened by a rising new order of things, made their animus and anti-social feelings heard in often violent ways. This was exactly what Lincoln had feared, and warned about, 100 years earlier: “…in the chaos of moblike behavior, men of the likes of ‘an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon’ would likely seek distinction by boldly setting themselves ‘to the task of pulling down.”

World War II (even with, or despite, the military’s segregationist policies) and the broad economic recovery of the 1950s, provided the national conscience a sort of make-up base to cover the continuing inequities endured by black Americans, many of whom had served the country with great honor, or who, like Rosa Parks, simply wanted to ride in a different part of a bus. School desegregation through Brown v. Board of Education, was a baby step toward racial equity, fought tooth and nail by Arkansas governor Oval Faubus. But, in a nation where even middle-class white women were restrained from job equality, young women were objectified in men’s magazines, and women generally were disenfranchised to a great degree, a Supreme Court ruling in favor of blacks seeking parity for their children in public education was little more than a lurch in the right direction. No court ruling, no executive fiat by a Republican or Democratic president or legislation fought for by leading members of Congress regardless of party affiliation, was ever going to assuage the hurt, anger, and distrust bubbling beneath America’s skin.

By 1961, the South—to be fair, certain forces in the South—had had enough of laws of enforced equity and chastisements shouted from Washington and the national media. White Southerners who embraced the Klan, or who saw the Klan as a motive force capable of standing up for their pent-up hostilities, were more than happy to begin electing local, state, and national officials who would revive and defend the buried honor of a failed state. And the burning began again, this time in earnest, and with real fires, bombings, hangings, and defiant State-house stances against federal orders.

The brutalities imposed on the Freedom Riders by the KKK (and supported actively or tacitly by the local populace and police) were the surface symptoms of the cancers beginning to bubble up beneath the skin of our Republic. Men like Alabama’s George Wallace, South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, and neo-Nazis like George Lincoln Rockwell, either did little or nothing to quench the fires of fear and hatred, or they found ways to stoke the flames. For men like these, fear and division are powerful tools of control, and the more fear and hate they could instill in their constituencies, and the more division they could leverage, the more they promoted themselves as champions of a fearful and divided nation, and the more powerful they grew.

Clearly, some surgery was required to excise the cancers that were surfacing on the nation’s once strong shoulders and remove the unsightly blemishes popping up on the face of America.

Popular music and folk music songwriters, singers, and groups—whose works included “The Times They Are a’ Changing,” “Blowing in the Wind,” “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Find the Cost of Freedom,” “Ohio,” “Fortunate Son,”—and traditional black protest, gospel, and spiritual music like “We Shall Overcome,” “We Shall Not be Moved,” “Oh Freedom,” “Alabama,” “A Change is Gonna Come,” “Mississippi Goddam,” and “Mister Backlash,” dovetailed in a tight fit to raise the social conscience of America writ large. Everywhere there was a transistor radio during the 60s and 70s, the incessant political drone was drowned out by angry, sad, thoughtful, forceful, plaintive anthems dedicated to peace, excoriating the military-industrial complex, or shouting warnings along the path to civil rights.

It’s not as if no one was trying to shake America out of its ignorance—many fine writers and singers were doing their best, but, still too many Americans were not interested in listening. The war was noisy, politics were noisy, riots were noisy, assassinations were noisy. When you’re trying to make a point, shouting above the fray and gunfire is not always effective; you become noise as well.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that the only Americans not listening to the warnings were Southern whites; political leaders of both parties, representing a cross-section of national political behavior and social mores, were often too intent on preserving their own gains and interests and power. From Lyndon Johnson to Barry Goldwater to Curtis LeMay to Richard Nixon to Mayor John Daly of Chicago, the protest movements against the Vietnam War and for Civil Rights were derided and dismissed, and the leaders of the movements became focal points of counter-rage from the highest offices in the land.

Would it be surprising at all to suggest that the animosity leveled from the top of greasy leadership pole against “hippies,” and “long-hairs,” would find a home deep in the poorest corners of the nation? Animosity from families—black and white—whose sons could not avoid the Vietnam War draft; animosity from rural communities locked in a miserable, grinding-down cycle of poor education outcomes coupled with increasing pressures to readjust their social and racial thinking?

It should come as no surprise that the children of those communities would, 40 years later, still see themselves as left by the side of the road, orphaned in the only world they had ever known, while the sleek bus of a new, multi-colored, multi-cultural, many-dimensional America pulled away. To those standing in the settling exhaust fumes of that bus, it must have seemed as if abandonment, ridicule, and stereotyping was the only life they would know, and their anger and frustration sought someone, anyone, who would prove them wrong. They could not know that at the precise moment in their lives, a young man growing up at the elbow of a New York real estate king was going to answer their prayers in the 21st century. A new cancer was on the ascendancy. It—or he—would take some time to discolor the skin of a nascent era of American comity.

For a decade or so, legislation pushed to the floors of the House and Senate by strong Civil Rights advocates, compromise-seeking leaders, and a young, motivated, vocal, and active university population, began to press even harder to dig out the deeper cancers of racism, poverty, poor education, and social disunity across the nation. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, along with the Voting Rights Act, represented, on the surface, fundamental changes for the futures of black Americans. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and its partner, the Higher Education Act, opened new doors for students of all colors, ages, and family incomes. Title IX, passed in 1972, was a capstone civil rights legislation for women in athletics. There were no perfect fixes to the ills facing black Americans, other minorities, women, and persons with disabilities, but for a brief shining moment—and fifteen or so years is brief in the life of a nation—there was a spark of hope.

It seemed, for a time, that national leadership was desirous and capable of a deep cleansing of old hatreds, fears, and social discord that polarized the nation: North against South, liberal against conservative, men against women, black against white.

Those who believed firmly that we were on a new and more equitable course—and I was one of them—were as wrong as wrong could be. The bus we thought was taking us toward a better America, was, in fact, making a slow right turn toward the past, and heading us back down the road to Anniston, Birmingham, Montgomery…and, on that sad route, passing through Charleston and Charlottesville.

Shifting Paradigms

Let me pause for a moment here to throw out a purely personal, barely-educated proposition about the effects of the “next big things” in American life on the cusp of the 1980s: the personal computer, the Internet, and their demon offspring, the cellphone. Growing up without the internet, mobile phones, and social media meant that if you wanted to communicate an idea, or share family news, or debate the issues of the day with your friends, you either had to write letters or speak directly to them (even a phone call on a land line meant making an effort to dial a number, and stay in one place during the call).

In the old model, there had to be some degree of personal interaction, requiring reaching out, connecting, communicating, and exchanging information, person to person—either eye-to-eye, or voice-to-voice. The Internet, social media, and the cellphone (a blend of both), removed the direct human connection from the conversation equation, allowing for varying degrees of anonymity which decreases risk of face-to-face encounters, where body language and observed emotions can be crucial to human understanding.

In the new model, such personal connectedness, once firmly-rooted in our DNA, is being callously uprooted by new technologies and new social habits. The new habits eschew handshakes, hugs, and real, physically-present conversations. Instead, the new norm promote sensory-depriving keyboard-connected friending and liking and emojiing (as well as unfriending, hating, and crude imaging). By embracing, encouraging, and normalizing such anti-personal behavior we are opening doors to the depths of loneliness for millions of our fellow citizens.

In his Sunday, October 14 column in the Washington Post, George Will writes about “Our Epidemic of Loneliness,” and quotes Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse’s new book, “Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal,” the subject of which, Will notes, is

“the evaporation of social capital”—the satisfactions of work and community. This reflects a perverse phenomenon: What has come to count as connectedness is displacing the real thing. And Matters might quickly become dramatically worse.”

Will continues, with quotes from Sasse:

“Loneliness in ‘epidemic proportions’ is producing a ‘loneliness literature’ of sociological and medical findings about the effects of loneliness on individuals’ brains and bodies, and on communities. Sasse says, ‘there is a growing consensus’ that loneliness—not obesity, cancer, or heart disease—is the nation’s ‘number one health care crisis.’ ‘Persistent loneliness’ reduces average longevity more than twice as much as does heavy drinking and more than three times as much as obesity, which often is a consequence of loneliness. Research demonstrates that loneliness is as physically dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and contributes to cognitive decline, including more rapid advance of Alzheimer’s disease. Sasse says, ‘We’re literally dying of despair,’ of the ‘failure to fill the hole millions of Americans feel in their lives’.”

Just as we are seeing the decline, if not the demise, of real-time-I-am-here-for-you relationships through the rise of hand-held links to small-screen duck faces, we are also in danger of losing our capacity to obtain and understand the facts of the world around us. Absent the electronic ease with which we now access the full spectrum of news—real news, fake news, not-even-fake-news—the average American had, in the mid-20th century, three news media options: newspapers, radio, and network television. Let’s begin with newspapers.

Power of the Print Press
Newspapers—the nation’s oldest form of public communication going back to our British heritage—came in three flavors at the beginning of the 20th century: dailies, weeklies, and tabloids. Most medium to very-large cities had at least two newspapers (morning and evening, with multiple editions of each); many smaller towns and some rural communities had a weekly paper run by a publisher well-known in the community. The big-city dailies, among them the very big national news dailies, offered well-known political points of view which were countered by competing papers. Their hard news staffs were most often seasoned reporters who adhered to the “who-what-why-where-when-how” method of news gathering. The editorial side of the big papers, and even the weeklies, was the space reserved for political opinions and side-taking, along with op-eds and columns expressing similar or countering voices.

For the most part—and there are always big-name exceptions—the major dailies could be relied on for solid reporting with very little editorial bias in hard-news stories. The New York Times was reliable enough to be consider the national newspaper of record. That paradigm shifted dramatically in 1982 with the arrival of USA Today, an upstart, in-your-face, high-graphics-content, nationally-distributed summary newspaper designed for people on the go—a nation of travelers and bi-coastal commuters. Every evening, the editors of USA Today collected the top news stories of the day from all 50 states, along with sports scores and money markets, and stacked them, face out, the next morning in a new kind of newspaper stand—one that looked suspiciously like a television screen or a computer screen. USA Today’s centrist editorial outlook was non-threatening, and its appeal soared. In full disclosure, I must say I was a USA Today columnist from the mid- to late-1980s, and while the paper has moved away from the format I knew when I was writing for it, its appeal—it is the most widely distributed paper in America—cannot be denied.

For well over 100 years, small-town America was a weekly newspaper market—farm news, local police matters, state and county politics, social comings and goings, births, deaths, and, when space allowed, a few cut-and-pasted stories from the national newspapers. In her doctoral dissertation at the University of Alabama, “A History Of Weekly Community Newspapers In The United States: 1900 to 1980,” Beth H. Garfrerick summarized the broad picture of community newspapers.

“For much of the twentieth century, small-town weekly newspapers connected with more small towns and villages on a regular basis than did the country‘s metropolitan newspapers. For example, in large sectors of the country the nearest metropolitan newspaper was located hundreds of miles away. A decade into the twentieth century, only fifty-one percent of Americans lived in metropolitan areas. The weekly newspapers of small communities played an important role in keeping the citizenry informed on local and national news. While a growing number of rural residents subscribed to both metropolitan dailies and their community newspaper, it was the weekly community paper that contained the news relevant to those in the immediate geographic area. The introduction of radio, television, and mega-merged metropolitan dailies with ―community news inserts did not supplant the weekly community newspaper as the main source for local news.”

As Garfrerick notes, over time, the small weekly newspaper, operating on the fringes of, or beyond the market reach of metropolitan dailies, began to morph into a “community” newspaper model as metropolitan areas expanded, and suburbs and exurbs spread into the once-rural newspaper geography and absorbed that reader demographic. Chains of community newspapers encircled big cities, tailored regional versions reflecting events important to a slice of each metro area’s population, while still containing news of broader metropolitan interest.

As of July, 2018, according to statistics compiled by the National Newspaper Association, there were more than 7,000 non-daily newspapers in the country compared to a little over 1,400 daily newspapers. Total non-daily readership is approximately 150 million (includes sharing), with a total circulation of 65.5 million individual subscribers or newsstand buyers. Perhaps of interest, about 30 percent of those readers do not have internet access at home.

The two most intriguing stats from the NNA’s report are the community paper market adults who rely on their community newspaper as their primary source of local news (51.8 percent), and the percentage of community newspaper readers who believe the accuracy of the news they read is good or excellent (71 percent). This is an important point to ponder:

Reflecting for a moment on the resurgence of racism in the mid-20th century, it is instructive to note the weekly newspaper’s role in informing the public about the rise of anti-black sentiment, and the South’s sense of isolation and/or victimization. As Beth Garfrerick points out in her dissertation,

“Weekly newspaper coverage during the post-war period also began to turn an eye to domestic concerns related to racism, particularly in the South. Hodding Carter, editor of the weekly Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, brought much attention to the issue when he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his work against racism. Some weekly editors in other parts of the country acknowledged that racism was not unique to the South and joined in the fight as well. For example, a 1946 editorial in the Bedford (Pa.) Gazette applauded members of the First Methodist Church of Monroe, Georgia, for adopting a resolution that condemned the lynching of two local black couples. The editorial referred to the sensitivity of southerners that too much finger pointing was turned their way and emphasized that racial violence occurred in the North as well. The editorial stated, ―They [southerners] will not be helped by silence.… They need assurance that they do not work alone or unnoticed ....”

The power of a community newspaper—whether a daily or a weekly—cannot be overstated when it comes to informing the public about racial issues, pro or con. Although it is easy today—30, 40, 50, 60, or even 70 years after the fact—for newspaper editors, and community leaders, to publicly regret and apologize for positions they or the predecessors took during the peak of racial violence and Jim Crow policies, in order to understand the depth of the damage done to race relations in the U.S., one must look back at the words used by local papers in support of the most heinous acts of inhumanity. This excerpt from a New York Times Opinion Page editor, Brent Staples, on May 5, 2018, reveals the collusion between racists and their local papers in the terrorizing and killing of black Americans:

The Arkansas lynch mob that burned a black tenant farmer at the stake in 1921 observed common practice when it advertised the killing in advance so spectators could mark the grisly event on their calendars. The organizers notified newspapers early in the day that they planned to kill Henry Lowery as painfully as possible, giving editors time to produce special editions that provided the time, place and gruesome particulars of the death to come.

Historians have paid scant attention to the role that the white Southern press played in the racial terrorism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw thousands of African-Americans hanged, burned, drowned or beaten to death by white mobs. This issue surfaced in dramatic fashion recently when the nearly two-centuries-old Montgomery Advertiser printed a front-page editorial apologizing for lynching coverage that dehumanized black victims. The apology coincided with the recent opening in Montgomery, Ala., of a memorial to lynching victims, and it sets the stage for a timely discussion of a deeply dishonorable period in Southern press history.

Staples continues,

Newspapers even bragged about the roles they had played in arranging particularly spectacular lynchings. But the real damage was done in terse, workaday stories that justified lynching by casting its victims as “fiends,” “brutes,” “born criminals” or, that catchall favorite, “troublesome Negroes.” The narrative that tied blackness inextricably to criminality — and to the death penalty — survived the lynching era and lives on to this day.

The Montgomery Advertiser was historically opposed to lynching. Nevertheless, when its current staff scrutinized the paper’s lynching-era coverage, they concluded that it had conveniently opposed lynching in the abstract while responding with indifference to its bloody, real-world consequences. The editors found that the paper too often presumed without proof that lynching victims were guilty and that, in doing so, it advanced the aims of white supremacist rule.

That description applies broadly to the Jim Crow-era South, where even newspapers that were viewed as liberal replicated the apartheid state within their pages — by separating news and birth announcements by race, by rendering law-abiding black people invisible and especially by denying African-Americans the courtesy titles Mr. and Mrs. This humiliating practice was meant to illustrate the impossibility of racial equality. It also let white readers know when a black person was being quoted so that the person’s statement could be ignored.

The newspaper editor Ira Harkey, who was white, incurred outrage in 1949 when he abandoned the Southern journalistic practice of automatically labeling black people by race in stories and began cautiously extending the courtesy title Mrs. in the pages of The Pascagoula Chronicle-Star “to certain carefully selected Negro women such as teachers and nurses.” Harkey was reviled — and shot at — by racists in Mississippi for championing civil rights. He wrote bitterly of his earlier years at The New Orleans Times-Picayune, where there was “a flat rule that Negroes were not to appear in photographs”; it was required that they be airbrushed out of crowd scenes.

Radio

I mentioned radio as one of the three key communications influencers of my generation…along with newspapers and television. I don’t need to get into an elaborate history of radio and race, or radio’s influence on society—those are topics for serious scholars and historians—but I do want to reflect for a few moments on radio’s reach into the mindset of Americans who, in my time (and a bit before), were predisposed to stereotype—and isolate—blacks, the poor, the middle class, and the elite. Unlike newspapers or television, which can display images to either clarify or distort an event, radio does its work without any substance other than sound to act as an ingredient in the fuel of the engines of information, disinformation, distraction, deception, and disarray.

Franklin Roosevelt was, I think, unarguably, the master of the medium, and he used it to connect with every corner of the nation—from the least fortunate among us to the mightiest—and he was able to promote and sell his visions of national reform from the comfort of his fireside—a fireside he invited Americans to share. He was also able to inspire the nation with powerful images of the Four Freedoms, and to charge the nation with the greatest mission of all—to avenge, globally, the deaths of Pearl Harbor, and defeat the purveyors of tyranny.

In his State of the Union Address, January 6, 1941, eleven months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt, spoke of those Four Freedoms. This is part of what most of America heard via radio.

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms:

· The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

· The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

· The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

· The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

Three-and-a-half-years later, on October 4, 1944, shortly before the presidential election, Roosevelt, again by radio, addressed the nation, and it is instructive to read through the remarks to get to his views on voter suppression and the rights of all citizens to vote:

My fellow Americans: 

I am speaking to you tonight from the White House. I am speaking particularly on behalf of those Americans who, regardless of party- I hope you will remember that- very much hope that there will be recorded a large registration and a large vote this fall. I know, and many of you do, from personal experience how effective precinct workers of all parties throughout the Nation can be in assuring a large vote.

We are holding a national election despite all the prophecies of some politicians and a few newspapers who have stated, time and again in the past, that it was my horrid and sinister purpose to abolish all elections and to deprive the American people of the right to vote.

These same people, caring more for material riches than human rights, try to build up bogies of dictatorship in this Republic, although they know that free elections will always protect our Nation against any such possibility.

Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves—and the only way they could do that is by not voting at all.

The continuing health and vigor of our democratic system depends on the public spirit and devotion of its citizens which find expression in the ballot box.

Every man and every woman in this Nation—regardless of party—who have the right to register and to vote, and the opportunity to register and to vote, have also the sacred obligation to register and to vote. For the free and secret ballot is the real keystone of our American Constitutional system.

The American Government has survived and prospered for more than a century and a half, and it is now at the highest peak of its vitality. This is primarily because when the American people want a change of Government—even when they merely want "new faces"—they can raise the old electioneering battle cry of "throw the rascals out."

It is true that there are many undemocratic defects in voting laws in the various States, almost forty-eight different kinds of defects, and some of these produce injustices which prevent a full and free expression of public opinion.

The right to vote must be open to our citizens irrespective of race, color, or creed—without tax or artificial restriction of any kind. The sooner we get to that basis of political equality, the better it will be for the country as a whole.” (my bolding)

Here was the change-agent power of radio being used again by a great leader to unite and give a charge to action that was without rancor, dissembling, ridicule, meanness-of-purpose. It was the use of radio to remind America of the founding principle behind the vote; it is our America, it is not the America of tyrants. It was radio that gave FDR the power to reach out and encourage racial equality and mutually-achievable national purpose.

From the Lofty to the Laughter

Ironically, at the same time, radio was also the popular medium for poking fun at, but also diminishing the stature of, many minorities. Blacks, Jews, Italians, Polish, Asians…all stereotypes found their way to radio comedy scripts that gave white Americans targets for cocktail party derision.

So many radio heroes (all white), had goofy, stereotyped sidekicks or servants of various ethnicities: (Matt Dillon had Festus, The Lone Ranger had Tonto, Paladin had Hey Boy, Jack Benny had Rochester, Hopalong Cassidy had California, Wild Bill Hickock had Jingles, The Green Hornet had Cato, and the list goes on). It was as if no hero could gain the trust of the audience if he didn’t have some foolish or subservient character to play off—even though many of those characters came to the hero’s aid in the last minute of the show. Even when the hero was paired with a woman (Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, The Thin Man with Nick and Nora Charles, The Shadow with Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane), with few exceptions the woman had at least one moment in every show where she was on the verge of some savage victimization, saved from the evil doer in the nick of time by the male hero.

My point to all of this all-too-well-known but cast-aside radio entertainment history is that with so few exceptions, white America elevated a certain category of male characters to heroic, nearly mythic status, while relegating minorities, women, and poorly-educated, often rural characters to comedic anti-totems. This kind of casting, overseen by New York and Hollywood studios, either purposefully, or by tone-deaf-inadvertence, drove wedges of social, ethnic, and racial differentiation deep into the foundation of American unity.

In February 2001, National Public Radio, through American Public Media, launched a series entitled, “Radio Fights Jim Crow,” with host Deborah Amos. In her introduction, Amos said,

“If you were a black American in the 1930s, two kinds of intolerance threatened you: Ferocious bigotry in the United States, and the lethal tide of fascism rising in Europe. As America prepared for war, your own government looked on you as a challenge to democracy, because the discrimination you endured revealed how shallow that democracy could be. Worried that racial unrest would erode home-front unity, the Roosevelt administration launched an unprecedented assault on prejudice over the radio. In the next hour, American RadioWorks correspondent Stephen Smith recalls the decade when radio fought Jim Crow.”

What followed over the course of that hour (Americans All, Immigrants All), and over the next three programs in the series—Freedom’s People, New World A’Coming, and Destination Freedom—covered the period 1941-1950, a time when programs like Amos ‘N’ Andy (created and voiced almost entirely by two white men, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll), and the Jack Benny Show (featuring the black servant, Rochester), among others, created caricatures of blacks/negroes that were wildly off-center and often little more than willful depictions of minorities as minstrel show buffoons.

To be fair, radio comedy stuck barbs in white lower-to-middle-class Americans as well, including The Goldbergs (New Yorkers), Lum and Abner (the fictional town of Pine Ridge, Arkansas), and, perhaps most famously, Fibber McGee and Molly—the forever goofy couple living at 79 Wistful Vista, in Depression-era-money-is-tight Wistful Vista (somewhere in the Midwest), and whose front hall closet was in a constant state of landslide.

But it is one thing to prick your own finger and laugh at your misfortune (Molly Goldberg, the Jewish mother of The Goldberg family, always found something positive to make of a bad situation); it is another to slide a sarcastic knife deep into the social fabric of an entire race of fellow citizens—voiced, ironically, by two white men—and laugh at the bloody result. You must keep in mind that we’re talking about white corporate America, through the radio networks and stations they owned, making fun of…and isolating through crude and slapstick humor…a generation of men and women whose children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are alive today.

Radio historians credit Amos ‘N’ Andy with being a breakthrough format, allowing white and black Americans to laugh at the travails of the “everyman” caught up in the daily routines and schemes of shared lives of struggle and unfairness, and, given the show’s wide popularity among listeners of both races for more than 30 years, it is hard to fault the show’s success on the face of it. But caricatures and stereotypes are isolating devices—and the long-term effect of broadcasting a show whose faux-negro characters fit neatly into a “black” box, painted white simply reinforced what many white Americans thought about blacks.

In an American Public Media discussion of the Amos ‘N’ Andy show (following an audio clip of the show), historian Jim Horton said,

“And so Amos 'N' Andy, in some ways, became a kind of confirmation in the minds of many whites that the segregation system was basically OK. That the racist thoughts you had were OK because they were based in reality.”

Television as a Teacher, Divider, and Isolator

No medium, prior to the advent of social media platforms, had as much impact on Americans’ perceptions of the state of society, the economy, politics, and long-term goals as did television from the 1950s through the 1980s. Until the expansion of television broadcast companies in the ‘80s, and the rise of cable broadcast a decade later, most Americans got their TV news and entertainment from a handful of national—and a few more metropolitan—networks. ABC, CBS, NBC, and, briefly, Dumont, dominated the limited number of broadcast frequencies available to American households.

It would be impossible in this article to categorize and list the incredible spectrum of programming available from early morning until the classic late-night signoffs (sometimes a devotional, often the National Anthem), but suffice it to say that television brought virtually every social situation into the nation’s living rooms, whether through drama presentations, comedy shows, music and variety shows, educational programming, children’s Saturday morning and early morning weekday shows, sports, and, of course straight news programs in which journalists like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Peter Jennings, and, eventually, women anchors like Barbara Walters, presented the day’s news with very little political tilt. There were political elements, of course, as seen in the (Chet) Huntley- (David) Brinkley Report, where the news of the day was shared between the two anchors, but always without rancor, and never with any sense of voter manipulation.

The immediacy of network news, and the advances in television broadcast technology—notably mobile television crews—allowed Americans for the first time to watch news play out in real time on the steps of a segregating university, or during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (56-years-ago this week), or in Dallas on November 22, 1963, or in the killing fields of Vietnam, or as Neil Armstrong took that first step on the Moon in 1969. Television—through entertainment and news programming—also let us explore social issues in ways that allowed for political commentary to shape our perceptions of what we were seeing.

In the South, particularly in the 1960s, national news programs—and many television reporters—were often viewed as skewed toward liberal agendas, highlighting racial crimes, reporting on racial and political chicanery, casting many Southern states and cities as centers of Confederate-thought, run by rough police forces and overseen by bought-and-paid-for judges. It did not help the Southern-white case when television crews captured on-the-street struggles between whites and blacks, or when the television cameras and microphones broadcast the hateful epithets of whites shouting at black children trying to go to school.

Seeing these scenes play out on millions of television sets across the country, Southerners had to know that their way of life, illuminated by the harsh glare of television lights and recorded for posterity, was being savaged by the national media, and used against them for liberal and moderate conservative political gains. But, for every liberal politician who decried Southern society’s inability to rise above the Civil War, there were staunch supporters of the Old South and of Southern gentility and Southern voters, who railed against the media and their liberal colleagues and liberal presidents. What television was beginning to show as two different Americas, politicians were confirming with their growing reluctance to seek compromises. The cracks creeping across the political landscape were beginning to break wide open despite FDR’s wish twenty years earlier that “The sooner we get to that basis of political equality, the better it will be for the country as a whole.”

Entertainment television was of little help in filling the widening cracks.

Writing in the Oxford University Press, in a paper titled, Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Media Content and Effects, Dana Mastro detailed the effects of television on Black and White audiences from the 1950s forward. In this excerpt, Mastro describes the portrayal of Blacks in 1950s television, and looks at the longer-term perceptions of those roles (I’ve dropped the citations, but they are available in the linked article):

Taking a historical look at depictions of Blacks reveals that many notable changes have emerged over the decades. In the 1950s portrayals of Blacks were dominated by unfavorable archetypes such as loyal but subservient mammies and ridiculed buffoons. Generally, Black characters function to serve and amuse their white counterparts on television. However, changes began to emerge by the end of the 1960s. Although these new images of Blacks offered idyllic representations of Blacks and U.S. culture (particularly when considering the realities of the era), programming during the latter years of this decade marked a positive change from the stereotypical messages offered on TV up to that point. Changes in the characterization of Blacks again were revealed in the 1970s, during which time a number of sitcoms emerged that centered on the experiences of Black families across varying backgrounds (e.g., Good Times). These shows were meaningful in that their predominately black casts helped bring more representations of Black Americans to the small screen. However, even in these shows, depictions of Blacks were still often stereotypical (e.g., lazy, unemployed. Further, characters harkening back to the mammy and buffoon persisted. For example, on shows such as The Jeffersons (1975–1985) more contemporary mammy characters appeared who deviated in appearance and lifestyle from these previous figures but reflected much the same overarching theme. In particular, these characters in the 1970s represented a range of skin tones and served affluent white and Black families. However, in these updated sitcoms, Blacks were often seen exclusively as care free figures, leaving these characters underdeveloped. Overall, quantitative content analyses of the programming airing in the 1970s reveals that that the prevailing portrayals of Blacks were as lazy, poor, and/or jobless."

These examples of how segments of America's communications industries have splintered the once solid beams of our foundation are not meant to be taken as a race/money/culture-is-the-only-problem diatribe. I’m not writing just about the disassociation of blacks from whites, of the poor from the rich, of the immigrants from the nationalists. I’m writing about example of a trend of separation and isolation. And in this last section, I want to address what I believe gets us closer to answering the initial question.

This is the End?
And so I come to the creation of cable news, the Internet, social media, and cellphones. During all that had gone on before, in traditional newspapers, radio, and television, Americans still had more control over their lives through personal, face-to-face or voice-to-voice communications. No matter what you heard on the radio, read in morning or evening paper, or saw that night on the news shows, there was time for personal dialogue, time to sit around the dinner table, time at the poker game, time to meet over the office water cooler to get the temperature of your friends’ and colleagues’ points of view. The arguments might get heated, but they got heated face-to-face; we could see the effects of our tempers in body language and gauge their intensity in direct conversation. Our circle of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and local associations (stores, banks, gas stations), were comparatively small, and the consequences of outrageous behavior were almost immediately felt within that circle.

If we unintentionally hurt someone, we had time, and proximity, to apologize and make amends. If we intentionally, and unapologetically, hurt someone, the community around us felt the effects of our actions. So, too, was the larger sense of community of the nation as the issues of racism, cultural ignorance, educational crises, economic swings, and political brinksmanship more attuned to the possibility of fixing things and finding common ground for public action on a national scale.

The works of the activists and presidential and congressional compromisers brought us so close to the tipping point of finally advancing noble causes on behalf of the poor, the poorly educated, blacks, other minorities, women, etc. Until the advent of anonymity by electrons—the use of our faceless, fleshless names as nothing more than markers in emails and messages and screeds—we were, I believe, within striking distance of an era of national renaissance. Before the ascendancy of cable news and 24/7/365 news cycles and talking heads, and screaming radio commentaries, we were able to consume news in reasonable bites, chew on and digest what we heard, read, or saw, and come to our own conclusions without all the shouting and distraction. I believe we were very close to closing the gap between misunderstanding and hatred; that lashing out that occurs when uninformed opinions clash with facts.

But once we were engulfed in a tsunami of “Breaking News” and able to share our yet-to-be-fully-informed impressions with legions of virtual friends, complete with Photoshopped images, cherry-picked quotes, irrelevant sidebars, religious sniping, and downright slug-fests playing out on our tiny screens, the tipping point no longer favored comity and concert; it tipped inexorably toward increased animosity, distrust, lies, anxiety, depression, and, as Senator Ben Sasse and George Will put it, loneliness on a once-unimaginable scale—ranging from the sadness of the individual isolated by cyberbullies and bitter politics, to the loneliness of an entire nation broken into islands of self-interests, self-protection, self-delusion, self-denial.

Those islands of loneliness, like the cancers of my burns, have, at last, risen and float now on the skin of America, each one in need of diagnosis, excision, stitches, and recovery. Can we do it? Do we have the will to address the root cause of our national cancer? Can we turn away from the incessant hum of the news cycles, to break our OCD-like need to check our phones every 4.3 minutes, the impulsive need to seek affirmation—affirmation by strangers who opine on who we really are as individuals and as a nation? Do we have the will to reject those in power who grow stronger as we grow weaker under the assault of lies and schemes?

Let me repeat the initial question:

“For us folks who are feeling trampled and flattened by a group that has no morals, what are we supposed to do? What is the most effective way to respond other than vote? Because right now I don’t trust that system either. I know I’m being a paranoid downer, but I’ll let the process prove me wrong after Election Day, but we may be in for a huge disappointment come November. Or this all may be just fever-addled despair on my part and I’ll be fine in a few days.”

I’m a believer in the power of the press and a free, vigorous, and expansive news media as the one sure check on governmental power and the abuses thereof. I am also an optimist when it comes to the power of individuals to ferret out truth from a burrow of lies. But the one sure power I know works, is the power of the ballot box, and the untrammeled right of every eligible voter to express himself or herself—their outrage, their messages, their discontent, their choices for something better—every election day. If there is any answer blowing in the wind, it is coming from the direction of the community polling places all across America.

It is only through the power of the vote that we will begin to heal the cancers that divide us, that isolate us, that bring such loneliness and anxiety to a nation otherwise filled with a populace that, once it sets its mind toward the stars, will bend everything toward that end.

I am informed of the difficulty—but also the possible salubrious destination—of our path begun in the 1960s, by William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech in 1950:

“Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”