Read It Takes a Village for Free Online

predicted the magnitude of the changes, good and bad, that the technological revolution would bring. The advent of television is the most obvious instance. We got our first set in 1951. It was a fascinating novelty, and my father complained that we would watch television all day, starting with 6:00 A . M . mass for shut-ins, if he would let us. But television was not nearly the presence in families’ lives or the influence on their values that it has become.
    Another big innovation was fast-food restaurants. We lived near the very first McDonald’s franchise in America, in Des Plaines, Illinois. I can remember how the sign announcing the number of hamburgers sold was changed from week to week. But most of us still ate dinner at home, at the same time every night, facing each other at the table and “minding our manners.” Going out to eat—even for a hamburger—was a special, memorable occasion. Today I know adults so busy with their jobs that they cannot tell you the last time they had a family meal that included their kids—and excluded the television set.
    Starting in the 1950s, we also began to move around more. When President Eisenhower championed the country’s massive federal highway system and airport-building program for national defense reasons, few people imagined how those roads and airports would come to influence family life. I took my first plane ride when I was in high school; my nephews flew across the country as infants.
    New roads permitted more people to commute to work in cities from suburbs like mine and to settle even farther away. The construction of highways broke up some existing neighborhoods and sapped the economic life of others. Daily visits with cousins and grandparents became rarer as businesses began transferring workers all over the country. We were among the lucky who could choose to sink roots and stay in one place.
    Advances in telecommunications were just starting then too. The houses in my neighborhood typically had one phone downstairs and one upstairs, with only one line. Children had to limit their time on the phone and use it in a public part of the house. We were not slaves to our phones; if someone called and we were out, they would call back if it was important. No one had an answering machine. And there were no cellular phones to interrupt what we were doing or to distract us from those around us.
    In many ways, families like mine had the best of both worlds—the prosperity generated by new technology and mass production, without the conflicts and anxiety these developments inflicted on households and individuals within a few decades. We could attain a comfortable standard of living on a single income, typically the father’s. Even with a limited education, people could find work and expect to keep it until retirement, without worrying about being rendered obsolete by automation or information technology. A third of the work force belonged to unions, and the gap between what workers and their managers were paid seemed like a fordable stream.
    Most of all, we felt that we were part of the same enterprise. It may have been the cold war that brought us together, but together was how we felt. When President Eisenhower urged us to study more math and science after the Soviet Sputnik was launched, we believed that our President and our country needed us to do that. President Kennedy’s call to public service inspired many of us too. We were not subjected to a daily diet of second-guessing and cynicism about the motives and actions of every leader and institution.
    It is difficult, for those of us who grew up in an era that appeared to embody so many ideals people yearn for now, to acknowledge that it unwittingly set in motion the very forces that sometimes make us feel isolated within our own households and communities today. So alienated do we feel from the larger society at times that we cannot imagine the village existing in any form