Earlier this week, I was thinking about Hands Across America. In 1986, for whatever reason, the nation attempted to join hands across the entire country. The oddest things make an impression on your childhood, but this did. I remember standing along Route 40 holding hands with my family and neighbors. As luck would have it, that major thoroughfare runs through my hometown. It was likely the most exciting thing in the village that year, except maybe the annual Ox Roast.

We had a battery-powered boom box tuned to some radio station that was giving us all the instructions and patriotic music to go along. I remember linking hands, and at times, there would be a strong pull in one direction or the other. My young brain imagined that the tug originated in California and had somehow made it all the way to this small town in Ohio – a multi-state form of telephone.

It was exhilarating and exciting to feel linked to everyone in my country. 

There was something earnest and wholesome about the event, at least in my memory. This was long before the Internet, social media, or cell phones. Today, when I look back, I imagine they were far simpler times. Much of that has to do with the fact that I was 12.

But now, here we are. We have never been more “connected” yet certainly never further apart. We would be hard-pressed to link hands across our neighborhoods now.

While technology has brought tremendous benefits to our lives, it has also slowly but surely stripped us of our ability to be awed, to be still, to be bored, to be free of interruptions, and to fully pay attention. 

It has wedged itself between us, somehow getting between us even knowing ourselves. I am not against progress or advancement. I own just as many gadgets and conveniences as the next person. And yet, we have arrived at a reckoning in our lives where the impact of the inhuman is beginning to steal some of our humanness.

We are more likely to interact with our devices than we are with each other. We prefer our television to going out with friends. We text before we walk outside and talk to our neighbors.

Again, I am just as likely to do this as you.

But I am not going to lie. That 12-year-old is still inside me, and she really wishes we could go back to Hands Across America. It was cheesy and also silly and impractical but it felt like America. The experience we are in now does not feel like my memories of 1986 or any others before it. I hope we find our way back to each other.