Reviews by Hubie Goode: America: Down at the End of Lonely Street

America: Down at
the End of Lonely Street


“And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.” - Matthew 24:10-12


Often times when we look around us, we find that the situations we discover ourselves in seem to have no connection to the outside world. Without the proper overall statistics on things and the information we need, the lives we live become isolated in our understanding of them. We often think that there must be something about us, individually, which has reason and meaning for the way things are. But such myopic view points, though understandable and forgivable, are often just fuel for a dangerous downward spiral of both a mental and spiritual existence.

With the overall statistics on obesity and drug use in our society, there is indeed need for information to help us understand just what is happening on the individual level, which is manifesting itself on the national scale. One of the statistics which has grown alarmingly large, is the number of people who are living alone.

I’ve written a lot about the last 100 years of United States history, and its social, economic and spiritual effects on our lives today, but who could have foreseen the meteotic rise of single living that is now at over 25% of the American population? In 1960 the total amount of persons living alone in the United States was at 13%. In 2000, the number was almost 26%, double the amount in only 40 years. Almost half of the city of New York lives single and alone.

With the rise of brainwashing propaganda like “Success motivation techniques”, we’ve also seen the romanticism of living alone rise dramatically. “Be in complete control”, we’re told. “Forget other people’s needs and wants, let them fend for themselves.” “Stand on your own two feet, pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Unfortunate comments, due to the reality that rarely does anyone ever achieve anything by themselves. Despite that reality, we’ve been told to keep ourselves busy with work, cook for ourselves and get some electronic entertainment to obliterate the feelings of being alone. With the rise of internet social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, where people can have thousands of “friends” they never have met or never will meet, it’s easy to see how we can fool ourselves into believing the lie. If you would like to get a better barometer of the loneliness in our country, and in many parts of the world, just join a site like IMVU.com, where you will meet shut-ins and social outcasts on a regular basis, some of them often pretending to be someone they are not, for a myriad of personal reasons. And yet the empitness remains.

Living alone can be a life of relentless, almost savage loneliness. You eat breakfast alone, you eat dinner alone. You sleep in a full size bed by yourself, not wanting to feel like a kid and sleep in a single. (Some of us do it so that we can be prepared for company, ....so we tell ourselves.) It can become such a problem that if a person doesn’t purposefully plan events to get out of the house or apartment on the weekends, they can “cocoon” for two days and their neighbors will think they went out of town.

Many of these lonely people have a deep concern that perhaps something is profoundly wrong with them, and only them. TV tapped into the fantasy of this idea last decade with the “Friends” idea in its TV shows, which still continues with many a sitcom to this day. There is a large amount of the population that finds it attractive to think that we could have a hip, sassy group of buddies that are always around in much the same way as an adopted family could be. Just do a background search for yourself to see how tragically untrue this idea is for many, many people all around the nation. Try the sites, USAPeopleSearch.com or Intelius.com, and try to hunt down the people you knew from your past. Amazingly, you’ll find that more of them than you would ever have guessed, have never been married, and they also have a dozen different addresses in different states and sometimes outside of the country. My parents were from the 1940’s crowd. They may have had three different addresses during their entire lives. People just don’t stay put anymore for the “friends” idea to take root. There is just too much loneliness, and when you are tired of going out to restaurants and other places by yourself all the time, you move, so that you have a ready made excuse for your current state of singleness and a new chance to find those “friends”.

Self help writers try to tell you to see yourself as your own company. “Cook for yourself as though you were about to have guests.” they tell you. But it’s all a lie. One more admonition to the tragic flaw within all of us that wants to believe we can be self sufficient and master of our own domain. All for just $29.99 and a place on the crowded book shelf we keep of authors who have all the answers. The dusty, rarely used bookshelf.

Lonely people often suffer in ways that manifest themselves in the physical world in results that can only be described a “weird”, even to those persons themselves. Sleepless nights, headaches for no reason. Muttering under your breath all the time, and for some, talking out loud to yourself at the wrong moment. Riding the crowded public bus and not minding when someone leans into you or brushes against you. It feels good to at least be touched. Massage parlors, both legitimate and the other kind, do a brisk business for these lonely people. As does Starbucks on any given day.

We need to recognize that there is another side to the national shift to singleness. Being alone too long brings on high blood pressure, dulls the mind, makes you more susceptible to illness and injury, and creates a false sense of reality that allows you to believe that you are safer alone. But we just don’t accept it. We are enamoured with the falsehoods that have been perpetuated upon our society by those wanting to sell products like books and TV shows that convince us to turn over our money for a comforting stroke of ego that only lasts so long. Then it is gone and we are alone once more.

Thanks for the advice. Were’s my money? Oh yes, I helped pay for your BMW, Mr. or Mrs. author.

I think it was a very wise being who once said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” And he is right. We’re not made to be an island among the sea of people we live only a few yards away from on any given day. You and I need each other, we were made to be with people, not disenfranchised. That is a lie straight from hell. Stop telling those who are alone that they are supposed to be their own best friend. Stop giving in to the falsehoods perpetuated by sitcoms and hit movies. Major university studies have shown that along with the rise of singleness in our country, we have also lost the connection to those we can trust outside of the home.

“Living Alone and Loving It” is all a perspective trick. Don’t be interested in perspective tricks anymore. If they worked, we would all be millionaires. There is no mental trick that can cure the sheer emotional poverty that comes from a society of single people, along with the increase in distraction and anxiety that it produces.

Nearly 30 million people in our country now live alone, about the same amount as those who are now on the unemployment lines. America is a real mess folks. The last 100 years of Americans believed the lies of the late 1800’s and now we are on the brink of foreign indentured servitude. The piper must be paid and the chickens have come home to roost.

We all need to reach out much more to those who we know are living alone, or are entering their later years still single. Often times these folks have no idea how to solve the problem, though they try and try. But our society has lost the ability to be “inclusive”, love has become “exclusive”. If only we could all see that love doesn’t belong to us. It isn’t our right or privilege to pick and choose whom we will be loving to. If you don’t agree with me, well then you are a “douchebag”, is a phrase I hear all too often when listening to conversations in real life or even on social gathering sites. You and I don’t have that right. We are commanded to love one another, and to forgive understandingly.

Love covers much.