If you live in town and your house is more than 75 years old, chances are you have a front porch with a sidewalk in front of it.
Until the 1950s, that’s the way houses were built and the way communities evolved. In warm weather people sat on those front porches in wooden swings and fan-backed metal chairs, sipping iced tea from tall Tupperware tumblers.
They greeted neighbors who strolled by. They swapped stories and spun yarns until darkness called forth the bugs to gather around the porch light. Then the people went inside.
Realizing television was yet to be invented and that computer surfing wouldn’t be possible until the 1990s, they went to bed.
Then about 1955 the post-war housing boom gave birth to the subdivision and the back-patio. Towns and cities expanded by adding tracts of houses on winding streets with dead-end cul-de-sacs. Few sidewalks were needed, because the neighborhood grocery stores were being replaced by distant supermarkets, leaving no place to walk of any importance.
The new houses had a front step instead of a front porch, because everyone had gone inside to watch TV and no one knew their neighbors well enough to say hello anyway. The new houses had backyard patios, where the families could place a barbecue grill and cook food out of sight to eat in front of the TV.
The new houses, tucked inside the maze of go-nowhere streets, were such a great idea that people who lived in the old houses along the town’s sidewalks abandoned their porches too. They filled the old swing with potted plants and placed a nicely dressed concrete goose by the door.
Then they went out back and built a patio with a barbecue grill and put a privacy fence around it all.
Crime seemed to increase, because the news on television showed violence everywhere. People, therefore, began locking their doors to protect themselves from the neighbors they used to know.
Eventually, cable TV, the internet and Google made it possible for everyone to know almost nothing about everything without ever leaving the house or having any meaningful human contact.
When all this isolation became too much to bear, someone invented internet “social networking” and “smartphones” to fulfill the human need for interaction with other people without actually seeing or talking to anyone.
Anonymous interaction emboldened everyone to electronically scream at each other about politics and religion and dog excrement on lawns and all the other topics once avoided face-to-face.
How sad.
All we really ever needed was a front porch with a sidewalk in front and a tall tumbler of iced tea.
Bud Herron is the retired former editor and publisher of the Daily Journal in Franklin. Contact him at [email protected].
