Many problems are not resolved simply due to lack of proximity. We often just can’t care as much...from a distance.
We have a car wash in our town that was recently purchased by an international organization that manages such businesses. Before the purchase, the car wash was kind of a crown-jewel in the area, for a variety of reasons. But, after the purchase, there is nearly unanimous opinion that 'things have changed' (and not for the better). It has gone downhill, as people say. Many of the same services still exist. But, the maintenance and care for the services seems spotty at best. It smells of a kind of distance that those in charge have from the details. In other words, it looks like the people who should care, don’t — because they don’t know about how the details are creating the problems that people are frustrated with. I asked one of the attendants how things were going with the new owner and he observed that he wishes the place was still the name of the old car wash (which they had to change). To prove the point, it isn’t just the market that is making observations about the changing value of the car wash. The very employees are as well (as they always are).
Banks are often another example. Across the nation, we have local banks as part of financial organizations, and we have national ones. And, many times you’ll hear something similar to the report of the car wash attendant. That whatever the challenges are for the local people, the national concerns seem to prevail in terms of priority. And so people will laughing say something like "well, you get what you get I guess — it’s not people around here or making the decisions".
This seems to play itself out in the current political divide in our country as well. And the dynamic again seems a little conspicuous, in the sense that what any one group thinks (especially about the other group) seems to be largely a result of very little constructive and human interaction between the two groups. We don’t see other people for who they are; we see our people. We even gather with our people, because we’re not those people. There is something about an almost institutional dynamic that develops around itself. In order to continue the maintenance of "us", we have to be talking about “them". And this very easily gets sophisticated enough that it is quite obviously becomes an us-them scenario at all kinds of levels.
A lot of this, it seems to me, has to do with proximity. A local radio station recently started a new initiative (One Small Step) where they try to find two people from different ideologies to sit down and talk to one another — not about politics, but about each other...as fellow human beings. Listening to another person, besides learning about what is important to them, is also an opportunity to learn about what is important to me and maybe a little bit about why. And, if that is identified to some degree at all, it can obviously open up the possibility that there may be some legitimate reasons for why other things are important to other people. One of the latent psychological goals of this kind of organized encounter, I suspect, is to allow for the human connection that can occur when people are actually closer (in proximity) to each other.
When we lose our collective sensitivity to the dynamics and needs of other people (similar, or not) as human beings, we lose a lot more than...finish here.
