When the Homily is about Immunology

Do McMansions cause Road Rage?

The newest McMansion Theme Park is well on its way now. Just down the street from our nearly former parish used to be a lovely little parcel of small acreage, mildly treed, lots of potential for small scale hobby farming, or just a place for the kids to stretch and run. Centered in this park like setting is a large home of unknown age, but I'm willing to bet if it could talk it could tell you some frightening stories about the development of Brier - never mind the ever increasing list of mentally unstable mayors.

We watched as the trees were ripped out and the grass somehow turned to dirt (how do they do that anyway?) and the building process was begun in earnest. Curiously the old house remained amidst the chaos of heavy machinery scarring the landscape, and apparently will continue to do so as the owners have opted to remain (I guess), turning their vintage home into an oddity amidst a sea of giant luxury woodboxes built virtually one atop another. To them, I suppose, their new view and sense of claustrophobia is worth the money...for me I'd have to be paying for my kid's new kidney or something.

The fancy neighborhood sign went up before they were anywhere near being finished with the first house, and they are calling it “Redrock” and outside of what looks like aged copper hung on the sign, I see nothing that remotely looks like red rocks. Nothing but dirt and cheap lumber. The second house is now underway and, as one would of course suspect, the distance between the two is astonishing. Once they build the fence...hmmm...fence...not to keep in your livestock, but to hide behind...to put some false sense of distance between you and the ridiculously close neighbor I guess. Anyway, once they put the fence in, you could not stroll from your backyard to your front walking side by side with your spouse – it is a physical impossibility. I'm going to try and check, but I’d bet these homes come darn close to making a reality of my joke that some new homes have more square footage than their lots. They make my current home look like Montana ranch land. Now, I know, clearly some people prefer living that way...like apartments (no land to care for...who has time???) while retaining that seemingly inherent need to own a home. But I wonder...

I’ve been reading Gene Logsdon lately. I have to say I do not enjoy him nearly as much as I have enjoyed Wendell Berry. Partly, I believe, because he seems to think that his agrarianism and his criticisms of the Catholic Church are connected and I simply do not buy it. He just has too much of a "worship at home alone" kinda attitude which to me smacks of unbelievable self-absorption. But, aside from that I do appreciate much of what he writes. In his book "You can go home" he has a theory explaining in part why we have seemingly become so impolite these days:

If people are no longer polite to each other, no loner tolerant, as sociologists say, could that be because of a lack of home life, a lack of suitable periods of privacy and solitude? Where people live more “lonely” lives, at some distance from each other, as in pioneer days, they tend to be more friendly to each other when they do meet. As a traveler I noticed that civility in public places increased as I went from more populated to less populated regions. Even between Minneapolis and Watertown, South Dakota, where I used to go with a cattle buyer when I lived in Minnesota, there was a marked difference in people’s attitudes toward strangers. People “far from the maddening crowd” appreciated company more, logically enough. But a bunch of humans jammed together would kill each other as rats did in similar situations. Road rage was a desperate cry for solitude.

I believe he is right. I have proved it to a small degree in my own experiences. Everyday now I walk a mile through downtown Seattle amidst throngs of people. I must pass dozens of people with hardly a smile offered to one another and it feels perfectly normal - almost expected. But in passing someone on the much lonlier streets of downtown Sultan, it just felt weird not acknowledging one another. Hardly scientific, I know, but I think there is truth here. Maybe part of the reason why we hardly know our neghbors stacked upon us is because we choose not to. They are simply too close…violating our personally space…too easily hearing our every argument, our every failed parenting episode, our special moments with our spouses, what TV we watch, what we like to do day in and day out. Virutally living together…we build our fences taller, seeking some solitude. It’s like forced intimacy.