As our relationships drift apart.

• Author: Hall, Robert E.
• Position: Editorial

Editor's Note

Not long ago, there was a time when families Were close-knit. So were communities. And businesses and governments, for the most part, were respected and trusted for their integrity. But over the last 50 years, that environment has shifted, and our primary relationships have become strained and distanced.

In his latest book, long-time ABA Bank Marketing magazine columnist Robert Hall examines this relationship problem and recommends ways that we can strengthen pur personal connections, thus making both our communities and our businesses more happy and productive.

Below are three excerpts from his book, "This Land of Strangers: The Relationship Crisis that Imperils Home, Work, Politics, and Faith," by Robert E. Hall. Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press, Austin, Texas, www.gbgpress.com. [c]2012 by Robert E. Hall. Reprinted with the authors permission.

In the first excerpt, Robert Hall outlines the scope of the difficulty.

While we often focus on tangible assets like money and possessions as being pivotal to our well-being, it is uncanny how often at crunch time it is the intangible value of our relationships that helps us navigate through individual crises--divorce, illness, financial disaster, loss of a job, loss of faith--as well as collective crises such as the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001, Hurricane Katrina, or the recent financial meltdown. The truth is, relationships are the most valuable and value-creating resource of any society. They are our lifeline to survive, grow, and thrive.

Today, the unprecedented unraveling of these relationships is destroying us. At home, at work, in politics, and in faith, a cumulating and compounding loss has collectively Retarded our growth and development and injured us in ways both known and repressed. It is hard to miss, the fact that pieces of our relationship infrastructure--family, friends, community, organizations, politics, churches--are crumbling. But until now, no one has fully connected the broader dots that form the plummeting are of decline and the rising slope of its cost; nor has anyone pulled together the narrative on its causes and cure. We cannot build better lives or a stronger society on deteriorating relationships. The measurable decline in the strength, number, and duration of genuine relationships has occurred at a time when the array of" relational choices and the freedom to exercise them has never been greater. Our democracy, capitalism, freedom of and from religion, technology, and physical and social mobility afford us an incredible array of relational choices regarding whom we select as our leaders, do business with, worship with (or not), and interact with (or not).

Already carrying the baggage of a disposable society; our most harmful waste has become discarded relationships, now piled up and rotting all over our planet. That we have a relationship problem is not news. What is news, however, is just how broad and consequential the relationship demise is across all facets of our lives:

* In homes, growing relationship dysfunction feeds growing economic disparity between "haves" and "have-nots" and the expanding costs of social services threaten government solvency.

* In a tough global economy, businesses strain to compete, while a few profit inordinately on the backs of broken stakeholder relationships (employees, customers, stockholders).

In the political arena, federal and state government leaders are gridlocked on tough issues like health care, employment, and deficits in an environment of extreme partisan divide.

* In...