Where Are Human Relationships Heading To?

Growing up, I remember neighbors coming over for a chat or us going over to their place all the time. We, the children, always played together, many times at my place. Our mothers exchanged not only recipies, but pots and pans, all kind of kitchen tools and many more things. More than once some neighbour would come ask us to give them a cup of sugar or baking powder because they were making a cake and just realized they had run out of this or that. And that was no problem -it was no shame to ask and if we had what they wanted, we would always give them. And they did the same in their turn. I remember a neighbor who always ran out of matches and would send her kid ask for some. Neighbors who did not have a TV set (yes, not everybody had one) would come to our place to watch a movie or some cartoons. When we didn't have a washing machine we would do our laundry at our neighors. They would come and take a shower at our place when they had problems with their heating and only had cold running water. And the list of things we shared could go on and on, but I guess you've got the idea. We were so close to each other and shared so many things! We felt like family.

I guess you'll say now that things are like that in some far away country. No, they are not. They have changed dramatically over just a few years. Romania became a free country. TV programs started being shown on not just one channel for 2 hours in the evenings as they had been during the communits epoch, but they were running all day long and on more than one channel! People who had been starved of information and entertainment from the West now stayed for hours in front of the tv, absorbing anything, like a dry sponge, be it good or bad. I remember that everybody was absolutely crazy about soaps like "Dallas" (we did not know they were "soaps" at the time). If you had gone out in the streets at the time when Dallas was on tv, you would have thought the town had been deserted. Not a soul was out there! By the way -by now, almost every family got their own TV set because lots of "second-hand" shops opened that would sell TV sets brought from "outside".

I was in the fourth grade when the Revolution took place. At that time, we were going to school on Saturdays too. Saturday was a work day. And a kid told me that we were going to have Saturdays off. You're kidding me! It sounded too good to be true! What will we be doing with all that free time?! Eh, I shouldn't have worried. When freedom comes and you get to be your own boss, you get more busy than when you worked for that big state factory. But I did not know that at the time.

With freedom, now, not all business was owned by the state anymore, people were allowed to start their own business. They were allowed to have more properties (maybe you did not know, but before that you could only own the house you lived in) and more jobs. Oh, and when your eyes are opened and you are shown more, you want it. What do you think people did with all that free time? They got a second job!

Before we knew, everybody became so busy that we did not have time to visit each other anymore. And then, someone who visited the West, told us that there, you don't just knock on your friends' door without making a phone call first. Really? "Yes!", my friend told me. "You don't even visit your own mother without calling her and making an appointment first." This sounded pretty strange. But if our western idols did that, we figured out that we should better get civilized and do that also.

So, over only a couple of years, people became more an more independent and individualistic, and less and less warm and friendly.

My dad asked me one day: "Is our neighbor still alive?" And I stopped and thought for a moment and realised I haven't seen or heard anything from her in months! I did not know whether she was alive or dead! 

The question came as kind of a joke, but the fact is that a piece of news told of how an old lady died in her apartment and nobody noticed that for quite some time! People had become so estranged that one could go missing for days and no one would even notice or care!

There would be many more things to say about how the way and means by which we relate to other people have changed. The Internet and social networking sites that have just exploded over the last years brought so many new aspects into the discussion, that I don't even want to get into that right now. That would make the subject of another hub.

I will stop here for now, asking again the question I started with:

Where are human relationships heading to?

In the end, I would like to leave you with this song about friends and friendship, that reminds us once again how precious a friend is! If you have one or two true good friends in your life, you should be grateful. They are very precious!