Closer than We Thought

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I was watching television not very long ago and I happened to stumble across the show “Primetime Live.” It’s tough to keep the news magazine shows separate, and I will acknowledge that. They all seem to tell the same stories with the same dramatic flair and they like to repeat the same stories over and over and over again. At this point if there is a creep looking for underage children on the internet and who gets invited anywhere and DOESN’T expect Christ Hansen to step out of the kitchen then that person not only deserved to be arrested and locked away forever for being a pervert but he deserves to be tackled by police and locked away from the light for being stupid. This show was not about anything to do with the internet. You may have seen this story. It really made me think and it made me wonder. Of course, I also wondered for selfish reasons, but it also just made me curious. It studied a fairly common phrase among most people and that is the idea that every person is only “six degrees” away from anyone else. You are probably aware of this idea even if you are not aware of the fact that it was a concept even before they applied it to the actor Kevin Bacon. The idea is that anyone in the world is six people away from you and if you just make a phone call to a friend that friend will, in turn, know someone else and that person will know someone else and, eventually, you will find yourself face-to-face with that person in only about six people. On this particular episode they put it to the test. They found a man who is a boxer and lives in a very poor area of Brooklyn. They then found two people who lived on the upper-east and –west sides of New York and showed them a picture of the boxer. They gave a name and who he was and where he was and told them to go find him. The thing they could not do was just look up the gym where he worked out and call over there. They had to reach out, as the first step, to someone they already knew. What was amazing to watch was that each of them reached out to someone they knew and took vastly different approaches to it but each of them managed to get to the boxer. The guy they found actually managed to get to the boxer in five steps and he got there first. The woman who owned a magazine in the Hamptons managed to make it in exactly six links but she managed to find an entirely different route. It was pretty cool but then the idea came to the producers to try and reverse it. Sure, when you went to people who were relatively wealthy and moved in large circles of power and had potentially hundreds of acquaintances and contacts it might be relatively easy to find someone. The question was, is it easier to go downhill then to look back uphill. So, they gave the boxer a picture of a pretty young woman who is a dancer on Broadway and had just landed a part in a revival of “A Chorus Line” and told him to do the same thing. Now, how could a guy who lived in a poor part of town, had never been to a Broadway musical, and mostly knew other boxers find his way there? Surprisingly he did it and he did it pretty easily. It really made me think. It turns out there is a university that has been doing a study on an even wider scale for some time now. They have people in the U.S. and other countries and assign them someone to find in Australia or other parts of the world. What the study has found is that even with an entire planet between the connections it was still possible to make the connection and do it, usually, in about six links. This study is done mostly through e-mails. So, I had to wonder, if this is the case then it raises a few questions. For example, does that mean I am only six links away from talking face-to-face with Stephen King? The one man I would love to meet and talk with might only be six people away, if based upon this theory. However, wouldn’t it be vastly difficult to do? Wouldn’t I run into people in the publishing world who would not want to give up his name? Wouldn’t it be easier to do if I had a television camera crew and producers who would let Mr. King know that some nut-job in Chicago who fancied himself a writer was going to see if he could get to him? I am thinking doing the search through a television show may make things a little bit easier than trying to do this on your own. Everyone wants to be on television, right? If everyone around the world is really only six links away from everyone else then why is it so damn hard to find Osama? Couldn’t Bush actually do it himself? Given this theory shouldn’t he be able to pick up a phone and make a call? Aren’t the rest of Osama’s family rather wealthy oil-type people who actually hang out in fancy rich circles and attend school here in the U.S.? Seems to me the CIA should be picking up a phone call and making a few phone calls. A boxer found a dancer so a CIA guy should be able to find a guy in a cave, I think. Technically, would we even need a CIA? What about an FBI? Why was it so darn hard to find the Unabomber? Maybe the whole thing is that people still feel like they are isolated and alone and don’t realize that they may be closer to that guy across the street or that pretty woman standing on the corner than they actually realized. Maybe it’s an idea whose time as come and maybe, just maybe, the entire theory needs to be looked at and a major change in the way we think should take place. If we really are that close to each other, maybe the things you do and say have more of an effect than you realize. Turns out that you may be closer to that person standing next to you than you realize. Maybe that means you shouldn’t be so rude to that person when standing in line to by your venti whatever. The planet, relatively speaking, is a very large object. In the vast scheme of the universe, it’s actually really tiny. While you may believe in a god or God or deity the fact is, down here, every day, we are on our own to get through it. That means we should start finding a way to rely on each other more. Maybe people need to realize they are not just in this for themselves but that what they do has a potential ripple effect that could touch all of us. Then again, I am supposed to be a cynic and this whole article is starting to sound very optimistic. It must be the Christmas music or something. Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format on his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com. Buy it and encourage a friend to do so.