Anonymity Is A Bad Thing

The newspapers these days are filled with stories that make one ponder the family.  There are the parents who have killed all their infant children; there are married couples where the husband or sometimes still the boyfriend has beaten his partner viciously and repeatedly and often she has come back for more; there are religious groups who actively disown their children who confess to being gay.  To my mind much of this stems from a climate in which the family is no longer a constellation of importance, where America's absurd emphasis upon individualism leaves everyone without the emotional and psychological support of a group.  Young people have sex, girls become pregnant, the impending event is not planned, most often not welcomed, by a circle of family, an automatic coterie of caregivers that traditionally cushioned the inevitable burden of new parenthood.  I well remember the early years of my marriage to my second wife, the mother of the four children who constituted my claim to being a family man.  My parents were dead, her parents were retired and living in rural New England, her siblings were on the East Coast, mine were scattered about the country.  By the time we had both attended college, we no longer were particularly close to any one of these people, and indeed did not live nearby any family.  Each of the four pregnancies was a surprise; we thought we were practicing the best available birth control, but we were stupidly misusing it.  It was difficult, especially for my wife, giving birth to four children in five years, with a miscarriage in the middle year. We were afraid of the psychological fallout of abortion and had no one to counsel.  We both felt alone, ignorant, put upon, with no one to turn to except each other, she drawn away from an architectural career she had planned, I harassed by the demands of the profession I was trying to enter. Those were years of intense and in some ways tragic struggle; it did the marriage no good. Several years later when we had moved back East to Boston our Brookline landlady once called us to report that she had seen our eldest child misbehaving (from her point of view) in public near Harvard Square on his way home from a private school in Cambridge.  It is the one and only time I remember in all the years of parenthood where a member of my extended community took the kind of interest in a child of mine that once would have been the norm and still is in a traditional society.  Yes, it takes a village to raise a child, and nobody pays any attention.  America's individualism is a dreadful trap and snare.  We are husband wife, father mother, daughter son sister brother, teacher student aunt uncle grandfather grandmother neighbor friend priest rabbi minister local grocer bartender and so on and so forth.  No man is an island.  Gossip is good.  Places where people walk by on the street are a better place to live than where they zoom by in their car. The ancient Greeks laid the ground work for the rich context of urban life with their city states, small entities centered on a public square where everyone created part of their identities.  Anonymity is a bad thing.