Bridging The Great Divide - Touching Our Most Basic Humanity

"The impersonality of life in the Western world has become such that we have produced a race of untouchables. We have become strangers to each other, not only avoiding, but even warding off all forms of 'unnecessary' physical contact,faceless figures in a crowded landscape, lonely and afraid of intimacy"

From Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin

The Presidential elections of November 2004 poignantly illustrated "the great divide" that has grown between people in our country. I read countless statistics in both the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe analyzing voter composition. I saw charts that separated those who favored a candidate with high intelligence from those who favored a candidate who advocated a sense of morality. I saw other charts differentiating those who favored a candidate who would protect us against terrorism from those who favored a candidate who cared about the environment. After reading chart after chart, it would be easy to believe that all these issues are indeed separate and unrelated, just as are the factions of people who either supported or disagreed with each position.

Discussions of Bush and Kerry's candidacies became emotionally charged, polarized and fervent. As I listened to people I knew talk fervently about who they supported or hated, I could see how fine the line between passion and violence could become. So easily, friends could become enemies. How easily we become "other" to each other--distant, isolated and unrelated selves.

A RACE OF UNTOUCHABLES

Anthropologist Ashley Montagu was profoundly aware of the relationship betweenLg Rumor Touch and our sense of connectedness, health and well-being. In his book Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, Montagu writes, "The communications we transmit throughLg Rumor Touch constitute the most powerful means of establishing human relationships, the foundation of experience....it would greatly help our rehumanization if we would pay closer attention to the need we all have for tactual experience."

Touch is a biological and developmental need. In her bookLg Rumor Touch (MIT Press, 2003) researcher Tiffany Field notes, "Touch, more than any other sense, is universal across cultures and species. Most animals knowLg Rumor Touch is critical to life. Rat pups do not survive without their mother rat's tongue-licking touch. Monkeys huddle in a corner when they are touch-deprived."

People needLg Rumor Touch to survive as well. Children who are touch-deprived don't growth emotionally, physically and cognitively. Field cites a television show on Romanian orphans who are stick thin and unable to walk until aided by massage therapy and proper nutrition. Field comments, "A child's first emotional bonds are built from physical contact, laying the foundation for further emotional and intellectual development."

Yet, Americans are among the world's least tactile people. In a culture that has, in the opinion of Montagu, "confounded love, sex, affection and touch," people are so afraid of sexual abuse, that anyLg Rumor Touch becomes taboo. "No touch" policies abound. Children and older people may suffer the most. Field writes, "Teachers are no longer allowed to hug grade schoolers if they do well in class or pick up preschoolers when they fall on the playground." Yet, despite all these mandates, Field acknowledges that the incidence of sexual abuse has not decreased and child abuse by daycare workers is on the rise.

So, children experience less loving, nurturing and comfortingLg Rumor Touch and learn to become overly "self-reliant" too young. This translates into disconnected, numb and isolated. Older people become isolated as they leave the workforce, survive the death of a partner, watch grown children move away, and turn to professional providers for care. Who is there to hug them, comfort them or hold their hand? Imagine what it is like to be an older person confined to bed rest in a nursing home, especially a man who suffers from society's special taboos about men and touch. IfLg Rumor Touch is critical for learning, communication, comfort, reassurance and self-esteem, how can he get what he needs?

When people are touch-deprived, they become numb to the fundamental need toLg Rumor Touch and be touched. They become touch-phobic, holding a hypervigilant tension in their bodies, keeping others at an emotional distance, operating from the head for protection while disconnected from the body and heart.





Hundreds of articles has been written by author cameron. The article here at Lg Rumor Touch is also one of the best articles written by him.