For a country built up on the romantic ideals of freedom, liberty, and the right to expression, America’s an awfully uptight place. Think about it. Even beyond the much-hounded trend towards political correctness, our society has bred a remarkably quiet, tight, culture. We guard our privacy like a hoard, we avoid the unfamiliar like the plague, and people look like they’d sooner hang than talk to a stranger. We even breed it into our children. “Don’t talk to strangers,” becomes more than a piece of childhood advice and grows into a mantra repeated and believed in by full adults.

In fact, this concept of alienating strangers has led to a lot of its own problems. Men, such as one construction worker in England, have refused to help stray toddlers simply because of ‘how it looks’ for a man to be handling someone’s child. The toddler in question, as it happens, drowned in a lake because nobody stopped them.  So let’s think for a moment: of all the people you’ve ever met, how many of them would you consider ‘dangerous?’ Maybe I’m just a people-person, but I can usually find common ground with and relate with almost anyone. I mean, a lot of us share a common background. A lot of us have very similar experiences, and if a stranger came to talk to us, ‘kidnap and mug’ probably isn’t first on our list of priorities. So why do we assume that of everyone else?

What I see evolving out of this pattern is a society that in truth is becoming very isolated. We have our families, our schoolmates, our co-workers, but outside of that our experiences with other people seems very limited. At the same time, other cultures are renowned for being remarkably social and hospitable, and they’re getting along just fine. What good does our inseparable right to speech do us if we won’t actually bother talking to other people? It’s a very simple problem, but I think that it’s something we could work to mend.  Not only would it improve our (presently nonexistent) sense of community, but you could even make the argument for its political benefits. If people talk more, then information spreads more rapidly, and an educated, communicative populace is the basis of any democracy worth its salt.