Is bad news a symptom of a bad diagnosis?

Bill Knight column for Thurs., Fri., or Sat., March 22, 23 or 24, 2018

I had the occasion to recently drive solo in silence from central Illinois to Keosauqua, Iowa, using back roads, and handfuls of bright spots were overshadowed by junk cars, vacant storefronts and abandoned structures. From Raritan, Lomax and Dallas City to Niota, Fort Madison, Donnellson and other towns, a sense of decay hovered like a ready shroud in a hospital.

Is the nation suffering some ailment? Can anything be done or are we slow-walking ourselves to a cultural emergency room or worse?

Many people are personally mostly hopeful. However, when seeing possible symptoms of a terrible (if not terminal) condition, and then doing nothing, we may be witnessing our own mortality, a finality for which we’re complicit if we remain uninvolved.

No amount of Casey’s or Dollar General locations make up for lost local groceries, clothiers, bookstores and so on. Sometimes, there’s LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, and Sunglass Hut, but they’re all owned by Luxottica, an Italian corporation. Such conglomerates often come from mergers, which seem lucrative for CEOs and stockholders but lousy for society. Besides Office Depot’s purchase of Office Max in 2013, pending or done deals include AT&T and Time Warner, CVS Health and Aetna, Dow and DuPont, Heinz and Kraft, and Monsanto and Bayer.

Some farmers fear that combining Bayer and Monsanto may mean paying higher prices for less choice, and more of the same falling incomes and rising seed prices.

            Big companies are “hollowing out these communities. In Iowa, we've seen half of our seed co-ops close in the last decade. This land is the most productive economically it's ever been, but the communities are thriving the least they've ever thrived,” said Austin Frerick, who ran in the Democratic primary for the 3rd Congressional District in southwest Iowa.

“When we talk about a farm crisis, what we're really talking about a rural community crisis,” he added.

Together with that business climate hurting rural areas and some urban neighborhoods, there’s a half-dozen somber examples that make dysfunctional Washington and Springfield look irrelevant (except for gutting schools and threatening nuclear holocaust):

Mass shootings: There’ve been 18 since the slaughter at the school in Parkland, Fla., and 11 so far this month, according to gunviolencearchive.com. That’s more than anywhere on Earth; little’s done.

Opioids. Few countries suffer from this “epidemic,” perhaps indicating that Americans are more vulnerable or more disturbed than most places, and we surrender to the drugs or seek them as an escape from situations we feel powerless to affect.

Forgetting the elderly. Whether it’s inadequate health care or Social Security, too many older Americans are “discarded,” facing loneliness, homelessness or futures of donning blue vests to work at big-box stores that contribute to communities’ vanishing businesses.

Loss of social bonds. It’s increasingly hard to care for others, and our life expectancy is now 80 years, 43^rd in the world, behind Europe, Canada, Israel and Japan, according to the CIA.

Indifference to the destruction of our country, continuing to work and shop and shelter within our walls as if things don’t merit our outrage and action.

Together, such phenomena infect the body politic. And culture. And society. Maybe even the family. One predictable response is to re-emphasize God in our home, communities and institutions, but He’s here – and has been all along. In Genesis, Jacob says, “The Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!” Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, “Earth’s crammed with heaven...”

Nobody’s perfect, but we are His hands and hearts.

Maybe it’s human nature to ignore chronic pain or endure others being treated as trash; maybe that’s too pessimistic, if not treasonous (as Donald Trump might say). But America is no longer a world leader. Let’s hope.

“Should the world follow the American model – extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue –  then these new social ‘pathologies’ will follow,” commented author Umair Haque, who wrote “Betterness: Economics for Humans” and director of Havas Media Labs. “They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food –  junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk –

 that America has fed upon for too long.”

Or, maybe winter travel through small towns is a cry for spring, renewed involvement and hope.