All together now If America is to stop falling apart, we have to get together
McCarthy, Abigail
ABIGAIL MCCARTHY ALL TOGETHER NOW Going it alone won't do The question was posed to me over twenty-five years ago but I remember it as if I'd heard it for the first time yesterday. I was at...
...To her mind spending time in organizations and working on their agendas depleted one's creative energies and robbed one of the cultural benefits of leisure...
...We have all experienced the distracted mutter of the person who is watching television while talking to us on the phone...
...Perhaps the most pernicious cause of all is the turning in on self caused by technology—especially television and computer technology...
...It still functions in small communities but is falling apart in the urban sprawl...
...Advice columns for adults have, for the last year or so, carried letters from distraught men and women whose spouses have fallen in love with people on the Internet...
...Again and again in our history those who suffered from inequality and isolation were lifted from it through groups...
...Then, like our parents who belonged to the Women's Club, the Newman Club, the Masons, or the Knights of Columbus, the Rotary and the PTAs, we joined organized entities like the Boy or Girl Scouts, the Junior Women's Club, the 4-H Club, and the Future Farmers...
...It is time we give serious thought to gluing it together...
...The letter is signed— "Needs help...
...Correction II In Abigail McCarthy's previous column [June 1] Iqbal Masih's name was misspelled...
...Today it would not seem so strange...
...The great achievements of the various forms of the labor movement are so obvious as hardly to need mentioning...
...the second, which saw women achieve the vote, stretched from about 1890 to 1920...
...These people do not have time for, or interest in, the people closest to them, let alone the community-at-large...
...Each of these periods had its origins in a time of national reform...
...For those of my generation and even the generation of my children (now adults with children of their own), to become part of groups was as natural as breathing...
...Women were attracted to reform activities and, in doing so, discovered their own inferior status and began to work for equal-ity...
...private clubs became a measure of achievement, as did professional organizations...
...The function of groups in helping minorities achieve equality can be cited again and again...
...She was having none of it...
...and the last, the contemporary phase, began in the late 1960s...
...I was stunned...
...in the Progressive era, in the early decades of the twentieth century, social workers, muckrak-ers, and reformers spoke out for the victims of industrialization and slum life...
...Every private club I know is struggling, without much success, to attract younger members...
...In the introduction of her Women Together, Judith Papachriston writes: "Three periods of intense activity stand out: the first began in 1848 and extended into the 1870s...
...But I tried to answer, "It's my tradition, I suppose...
...My aunts joined unions, collectors' clubs, art clubs...
...My mother, my grandmother, belonged to women's groups...
...Commonweal apologizes for the error: not watching our gs and qs...
...It goes back to the quilting bees and potluck gatherings of pioneer women...
...Fraternal insurance groups—really burial societies—gave poor immigrants a focus, some economic security, and a means of socialization...
...and in the 1950s and 1960s, protesters called attention to minority and poverty groups denied civil rights and economic opportunity...
...He held, as Seymour Martin Lipset writes, that "Americans are encouraged to press for their objectives through individual or organized group action, not to accept their lot or to hope for remedy from an established upper class...
...They quizzed me as to what I was doing and I had talked of my work on the boards of several women's organizations...
...Later, volun-teerism became a way of life...
...They enlarged identities—our sense of who we were...
...It had never occurred to me that there were people who did not think it normal to behave in the way de Tocqueville saw as quintessentially American—to form groups, to join groups, and to tackle problems cooperatively...
...The government existed to take care of common interests...
...That substructure of community, the network of organizations, is now at risk...
...What has happened to the nation where, as de Tocqueville described it, organized groups were the norm and every community was crisscrossed with their networks...
...The answers are various...
...I use it on average ten hours a day five times a week...
...I was at cocktails on a balcony in Miami with casual acquaintances— New Yorkers known to my traveling companion...
...Our nation is falling apart...
...But as important as groups were in building equality, their effect on character was equally important...
...We know people who find it hard to welcome real persons as visitors because they are so caught up in the characters of a favorite sitcom...
...We are all aware of the results of the recent sociological research that the tendency to isolation or extreme individualism has extended even to bowlers, many of whom now prefer to bowl alone rather than join a bowling league...
...In the seventies the new feminists attacked the concept of men's clubs or women's clubs, whether social or professional...
...Organizations can age...
...there was no need for intervening groups between the individual and the state...
...Volunteer organizations have to rely largely on retirees...
...Why do you give your time to these, these—" she faltered for a descriptive word—"these groups...
...The root of her point of view—essentially an elitist one—probably lay in her European background...
...The hostess broke out in seeming exasperation, "But why do you do that...
...With the burgeoning of the personal computers and the Internet a new addiction has developed...
...For better or worse and for different reasons we have become a nation of nonjoiners...
...Before the Civil War, abolitionists agitated on behalf of black slaves...
...They were a means of integration into the larger community, and a way of merging individual interests with those of the larger society...
...I thought her attitude very strange then...
...And from the middle of the nineteenth century until the present, women became a force in society and eventually full members via group movements...
...In the sixties there was a severe reaction against those groups and clubs viewed as elitist and exclusionary—from golf clubs and the DAR to college fraternities and sororities...
...On the day I write this, the morning paper carried a letter in an advice column for adolescents from a teen-ager with a pressing problem: "For the longest time I have been addicted to using the computer...
...Funeral societies did the same among blacks in the South...
...For women this goes back to the days of the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when women immured in the home sought companionship and inspiration at the prayer meetings and discussions in Anne Hutchinson's parlor...
...What tore it apart...
...Their original purpose may vanish and they can become obsolete unless they are revitalized by leadership with new vision...
...First came the neighborhood play groups—playing Softball, organizing games of "chase" with great choosing of sides going on through the summer twilights...
...It seems natural to me—to reach out to others of like interests and purpose...
Vol. 123 • July 1996 • No. 13
