I get many emails about the topics of these columns. Recently, one came from Thomas Bartholomew of Slatington. He responded to “Doing the Turnpike Twist” that I had written a few weeks ago in which I described stereotypes of drivers I encounter on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I even labeled my driving self as Rich Lost Again because I have an awful sense of direction. Bartholomew has this problem, too. He wrote, “It’s so frustrating that I almost hate going anywhere further afield than my already well-worn paths like some old water buffalo.”

The gist of his email, however, is a serious discourse as to why our country has lost its sense of direction and why there are so many Americans who are the missing links of our population’s social connectivity.

Bartholomew read a Science magazine article about human character types that make up a healthy society. One point the article makes is that there’s a fine line between a good or an evil psychopathic personality.

“Surgeons test very high in psychopathic ranges,” Bartholomew says. “Who knows? Maybe Jeffrey Dahmer with a few more smarts and less mental illness might have become a renowned brain surgeon.” The article stated that some psychopaths are able to make pragmatic decisions for the greater good and play a vital role in holding society together.

Bartholomew made another observation that the human race has historically evolved into different mixes of personalities whose contributions to society have helped it operate at its fullest potential. To explain this in another way, if you want to make a gourmet meal that requires you use a dozen different ingredients, the food will deliver the perfect taste. Society is at its best when people offer a unique blend of talents for everyone’s benefit.

Yet, that seems to no longer be the path of human evolution, he says. “Perhaps today we are all stuffed in the same little box and people just don’t fit into our society anymore in what is a fairly recent phenomenon. Perhaps this is the cause of so much rage, mental health problems, ADHD, and other psychiatric and suicidal problems. We are totally removed from the culture we were designed to live in.”

Bartholomew implies that human evolution is taking a turn in the wrong direction. He says that the truck drivers who intentionally get into the fast lane on the turnpike to block the cars behind them might have been “defenders of a village” types hundreds of years ago.

The woman who annoys people in the checkout line by asking the cashier to recheck every price of her items might have been the one who paid attention to every detail in Colonial America and was able to remove a poisonous mushroom from being eaten.

The guy driving 100 mph down the Pike could have been a scout and a messenger back in the day. Those who stepped outside the box were inspirational for others to break through social restraints that inhibited personal growth and in doing so, they motivated us to do better for ourselves.

Literature has also created characters who jumped from the box and into uncommon action. Huckleberry Finn ran away to live a life of adventure on the Mississippi River. Biff Loman from “Death of a Salesman” said screw the business world and went out to work on a horse ranch in Texas.

Not so much in today’s America. Huck might continue to live under the rules of his cantankerous old aunts and Biff would work for 40 years in a salesman’s job he absolutely hated.

Where’s the spirit that once made this country great? There are more over 40-year-old adult children still living at home with their parents than ever before and they seem content just to have meals every day and a warm bed to sleep in. We have thousands of young Americans who chase the big dollars to buy BMWs, 5,000-square-foot houses, and take expensive vacations every year.

This phenomenon makes one wonder what memories this generation will bring into their senior years when buying another luxury car or taking a three-week trip to Greece becomes all they have to remember instead of what they could have contributed to help those stuffed in the box.

American journalist, Zoltan Istvan wrote, “(Society) is a mindless goliath … devouring lives, erasing potential, and following its every whim - regardless of how irrational, obscene, uneducated, enslaving, or backward its actions are. The American dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It’s unequivocally absurd.”

Bartholomew adds, “I think that our society is so removed from the existence from which evolution made us that we are a dying race, dying from the inside out.”

As far back as the early 1800s, Ralph Waldo Emerson warned Americans about the decline of individual spirit and the worshipping of idols. “Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other … it is barbarous, … it is rich, it is scientific. … For everything that is given, something is taken. … We do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody … we are tickled by great names. … Society is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

We can’t see the light while we’re sitting in the dark. We wait for the next idol to promise me what I want or what you want, and certainly not what the whole of our country needs.

An awareness of this troubling concern is the first step toward finding complex solutions to break down the walls of the box and rebuild relationships necessary for a thriving society.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.