Well Enough Alone?

In 1967, The Rolling Stones were famously forced to alter the lyrics to the song Let’s Spend the Night Together because Ed Sullivan felt that the title was too suggestive for his TV viewing audience. Instead, the Stones sang, Let’s Spend Some Time Together. Nearly six decades later in America, it’s arguable that the replacement lyrics are more subversive than the original. We spend a lot less time spending some time together than we used to. Somehow, we went from waiting on a friend to saying, hey, you, get off of my cloud. If you’re more a Beatles person, we went from Come Together to emulating Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear. No one comes near. How did we go from needing a little help from our friends to becoming a nation of all the lonely people? And how does breaking up the band and going solo impact everything from our internal lives to our political landscape. The numbers representing the shift are nothing less that remarkable. Derek Thompson in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out. “After the 1970s, American dynamism declined. Americans moved less from place to place. They stopped showing up at their churches and temples. In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam recognized that America’s social metabolism was slowing down. In the book Bowling Alone, he gathered reams of statistical evidence to prove that America’s penchant for starting and joining associations appeared to be in free fall. Book clubs and bowling leagues were going bust. If Putnam felt the first raindrops of an antisocial revolution in America, the downpour is fully here, and we’re all getting washed away in the flood.” I like both the Stones and the Beatles, but I’ll conclude with some lyrics from a singer I spend most of my alone time with. Bruce Springsteen: When you’re alone, you’re alone. When you’re alone, you ain’t nothing but alone.