When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, one thing that impressed him was how often Americans joined groups to solve problems. He wrote that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations.” Instead of waiting for the government to solve a problem, people got together with their neighbors and handled it themselves.
I’m a student at Wabash College, and I’ve been reading Tocqueville and Fraternity this semester. I don’t think he would say the same thing about us today. A lot of people, including me, spend most of their free time on their phones. It’s easy to feel connected to people online without actually doing anything with them. We also don’t seem to have the same presence of people being proactive about improving things for themselves from a government standpoint.
Tocqueville warned about this. He called it individualism, where people pull back into their own small circle of family and friends and let society take care of itself. He thought groups were the fix, because working on something together makes people care about more than just themselves.
At Wabash, I’m in a fraternity and a few clubs, and they’re some of the best parts of college for me. Crawfordsville has plenty of groups too, like churches, service clubs, and volunteer organizations. Pick one thing in your community you care about and find the people already working on it.
Grayson Goff
Lebanon
