IT AIN'T NEVER GOING BACK TO BEFORE

Tucked behind two great oceans, "splendid isolation" was how we described our foreign policy the first 150 years. No more...! Today, if a banker sneezes in Athens, Wall Street catches a cold. If BP's stock drops in London, your personal pension fund takes a hit. Instead of isolation, today we live in intimacy. Whether we want to or not.

While 43% of us can't name our neighbors, strangers we've never met are helping shape our lives. We love the instant global communications, but are our brains and pocketbooks prepared to process the pressure of it all?

At one time -- you can still spot it in countryside America -- there were miles of croplands between homes. The pace was slower, simply because we were farther apart. Isolation like this meant lonelier nights, but perhaps deeper thoughts. Isolation like this meant quieter living, but possibly more thorough reflection.

Too late now to test the premise, for today most of the world's 6 billion people are either crowded together into large metropolises or are within a cellphone's reach of anyone on the planet. Think about it -- if we were all doing wonderful things for humanity, how inspiring such reach would be.

However, inspiring is not what the news does. More likely, what pierces the protection of our personal isolation is the 24/7 news of threats, of violence, of disasters. None of which we can personally do a thimble-worth-of-good about, but which now we have the dubious privilege of knowing about.

I can remember as a kid visiting cousins in the turn-of-the-20th C farms in southern Illinois. Lonely out there...but as I recall it, everyone slept pretty snug at night. Isolation or ignorance -- it had its rewards.