Disconnected

I suspect that I've said this before, but every so often, something really drives it home to me: Humanity doesn't scale well.

I live in what might charitably be described as a faceless suburb of Seattle. It's a little more upscale, and somewhat less conservative, than the faceless suburb of Chicago that that I grew up in, but both were the sort of bland, colorless places that you could drive through and never realize that you'd been there. They're also both the sort of place that are small enough that city-dwellers regard them as minuscule, but large enough that they readily subdivide into cliques that have little to do with one another.

A couple of neighborhoods over, on the other side of the expressway, a house caught fire early this morning. I noticed it because the house in question is on a ridge overlooking the grocery store that I normally shop at. From below, the plume of smoke was easy to see. I drove by the scene on my way home. Fire trucks and ambulances were still arriving, even as the firefighters already on the scene where working to, I suspect, keep the fire from spreading to the other homes nearby, as the large, boxlike structures filled most of their lots. Uncontrolled, the flames would certainly have jumped the small gaps on either side.

Throughout the day, I checked the news, looking some word on what happened. Nothing. There didn't seem to be a single mention of the home that had burned. It was if nothing had happened. Even the smell of smoke was faint by the time the remnants of the plume reached my home, and well before lunchtime, even that was long gone.

I'm not nostalgic for the small-town life. I'm not wishing that one of my neighbors had knocked on my door to draft me join a bucket brigade or into caring for a burned pet. Communities like that are close-knit, but that comes at a price. Still, there's a part of me that thinks that a fire nearby should be a bigger deal than this one feels like.

If I hadn't just decided to go to the grocery story, more or less at random this morning, I would have never known that there was a fire. It would have been just another in an endless series of non-events that happen in places like these. Places that don't have enough people to have the sorts of things that make them interesting, but do have enough people that the vast majority of them will be forever strangers.

One of my neighbors did stop by today. She'd received an official-looking letter that, with her limited English skills, she had difficulty parsing. I skimmed it, then read it more closely, then explained it to her, along with what was being requested of her, and what she needed to do to fulfill that request. We didn't talk about the fire. She had the letter to concern her, and I needed to get back to work. As near as I can tell, she had no idea that, not very far away, a family may have been burned out of their home that morning. Because between our homes, and the one that burned, there are just too many people to know them all. And for all of the technology that we have to supposedly stay connected to one another, most of those connections are lost in all the noise.