I and Thou

Starting the day out with the weird sensation of isolation. My car is in the shop and my wife is driving the van. But there's more to it than lack of vehicle. I was reading essays last night on TV and Us-ness, and came to understand that as I've dropped my TV watching way below the 6 hour a day avg. per American household, I have lost some feeling of belonging to a larger group.
It's more obvious than ever how different You are from Me, and how a brief loss of contact is easily translated into years of no contact at all. People I once thought I was very close to now have been without correspondence of any kind for years and years. There's an indifference at work, a by-product of the economic downturn, like what might be experienced in a breadline, when you get closer to the front and realize the folks in the back aren't going to get any bread, there isn't enough for everyone. You hike up your collar and turn eyes to the front and try not to think about it. And then after a while you receive an obituary in the mail.

Also, for some unrelated reason, I was thinking of the German Christian existentialists like Buber or Heidegger, with their great insight into God and Man, and how they turned out to be Nazi apologists and Jew-haters, as indifferent to the camps and gas chambers as psychopaths.
And before them, Nietzche and his God is dead routine, then locked in a mental asylum for years while his family found ways to profit from his writings. There's some screwy thing about most philosophers and deep thinkers, some desperate urge to be nailed to a cross or to oversee the creation of ant-kingdoms to replace the freedom of individuals. It all comes down to Don't follow leaders, or walking parking meters. It comes down to I and Thou.