Isolation?

Could isolation be the single most soul-crushing circumstance for a human to bear up to as we move through this world?

The suicide of a young man whom my oldest son went to high school with caused me to reflect on this possibility. I live in a rural south Arkansas town, which on the surface seems to be doing all right; if not a little shop worn and stagnant.

As evidence of things being “all right” we highlight our two small college campuses, our proximity to a Corp of Engineers lake and two nearby rivers, our timber industry, and our small town family values as demonstrated by the numerous Protestant churches in the area. Yet, it seems to me that we are less willing to discuss our economically dying region of Arkansas, the number of young people who move away never to return. We certainly won’t mention that “west end”, is a polite term for our racially segregated black side of town, or that our churches are racially segregated and divided by idealogical differences. We seem to be at a loss to explain that despite the large numbers of these churches, we still have a high teen pregnancy rate, an abundance of sexually transmitted disease, a high divorce rate and low college attendance. We are not too concerned that our affluent areas are prospering, while our middle income is shrinking and our low income is growing. The dichotomy between our perceptions of the positive and our apathy to the negative, helps in creating our isolation and resentment one from another, it seems.

Ours is a typical southern community in that we remind our young people to “protect the family name” (even if that means covering up problems), going about daily life as if we have no worries, and avoiding the “wrong type of people. We also teach them to be polite to the extent of not speaking of troubles or differences of opinion in public, that it is really better to let these differences fester just under the surface in our little isolated groups that tend to stand out like lone trees on the prairie to anyone willing to look.

I wonder if it is our young people are people doing the looking, and being troubled by what they see. I wonder if they begin to perceive a lack of authenticity between our stated values on love, community, justice and religion; versus the way we actually behave. I wonder if they taste the isolation we have established more distinctly than my age dulled ones can, if they don’t really believe they can be who they feel they are and pursue their dreams here and still be accepted. I wonder if they understand better than me the lack of community we have come to be.