The Cynic Express(ed) 1.20: Minus Community

     Faced with the threat of white flight following Highway Forty westward from St. Louis to St. Charles County, St. Louis mayor Clarence Harmon made an appearance on the evening news pleading for people to stay calm in their homes in the St. Louis area and the resident St. Charles government smirking head followed, saying that people have a right to live wherever they want, which meant in whatever tax base they want, especially if it were his. Regardless of the pattern of the dispersal of people to the creeping moss of suburban development, regardless of the impact of the rippling of decent society outward from urban centers, one of the most important fatalities of the modern migratory patterns of United States is the sense of community, not so much a warm cup of kitsch and slice of black-and-white Bedford Falls coffee cake but a recognition of where one fits in, if not the universe, then in a group of neighbors or peers.

     So what's this cynic doing, this purported individualist, talking about a sense of community? I am not talking about The Community, which is some abstract blob along the lines of The State or The Collective, slobbering and shambling along for young Steve McQueen individuals to face and defeat. I am talking about a collection of individual people, drawn together by proximity as well as common beliefs, ideals, and/or goals. Neighbors and peers. Friends and acquaintances that could get together to build a church, raise a barn, or just have over for a barbecue and a few cappuccinos.

     I have been a part of such communities. Neighborhoods, actually, where people throw their lot in for a communal yard sale (although, as the one I wax nostalgic for in this sentence was a housing project in Milwaukee, they called it a rummage sale) or for a block barbecue. Or a trailer court in a rural Missouri hollow (Missouri shorthand for a small, undeveloped valley) where pockets of families know each other often walk to each others' homes for as much as an evening chat or as little as to form organized search patterns for wayward Lhasa Apsos. Places where if Ann across the street saw someone loitering around the house, she would be able to tell if Kevin had lost his keys again and was going in the back window or if there was a prowler loose, and more importantly, she would care.

     In the contemporary society outside those little Bedford Falls memories (hereafter referred to as BFm), I have seen far less. Among the upper class subdivisions in Chesterfield, Missouri, where every street is a cul-de-sac designed to foster a sense of isolation (or, as I am sure developers sell it, privacy), neighbors names may be known, but most of the neighborly discourse is not between neighbors, but about neighbors, and at seven o'clock every morning, residents hope into their Acuras and drive thirty miles to the office and at seven o'clock every night they arrive home and disappear into their homes to watch the Discovery Channel and walk miles on treadmills in their basements, preferring the wood grain of paneling to the scent of chlorophyll outside. I have seen a development just outside of Columbia where the residents are all but invisible to each other most of the time, commenting to a friend and Heather that the only difference most of the time between the neighborhood and a ghost town is some rather natty tumbleweeds. "They're only rentals," she counters. So were the projects.

     Perhaps it's only a psychological reaction on my part. I'm just creeped out by the way the structures stand without people or without even the permanent shadows present in Bradbury's "And There Will Come Soft Rains." I doubt it, though.

     There is a certain security in knowing your neighbors. You get a sense of who is going to have the tool you might need to complete a home remodeling project when a hammer and a standard screwdriver won't (in the two or three cases where they won't) and would be happy to loan the proper tool to you (like Mr. Fritz, the retired gas man next door). Or who is the neighborhood's Most Likely to Get a Three Strikes Life Sentence (like the man who will remain nameless until proven guilty). Or at the very least the name of the guy with whom the UPS driver dropped your current installment of Time-Life books so you can thank him by name.

     Even communities by choice, such as The Elks' Lodge, the church, and the P.T.O.'s offered those face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder potluck dinners to members, renewing human contact after a day in the mills or at the office. Goal-oriented but enjoyable, reinforcing the individual's sense of purpose and giving an opportunity to showcase talents and aptitudes--as well as hone those same talents or even develop new ones. Unfortunately, as any Optimist International member will tell you, membership is down and interest is drooping. Whether the culprit is primetime television or sixty hour work weeks, apathy or fatigue, those traditional binding forces are fraying.

     Modern society has provided some solutions, mostly in the form of technological buzzwording. Creating an Internet community, for instance, is the goal of many marketing departments everywhere. Internet friendships and more are possible (hey, I am living and loving proof), but do they represent community? Many Internet friends will never meet face to face. The nature of the Internet reinforces that distance, relegating those who share even the most important ideological bonds to a distance by the very nature of their bits and bytes, pixeled contact. Besides, does stlbrianj@aol.com have a tap wrench available when you really need it, and can he bring some of that yellow cake he makes from scratch to dinner next Friday?

     The neighborhood community, to bring this inflated five paragraph essay full square, provides certain human pleasures and warmths that cannot be matched by modern contrivances that facilitate long distance contact but not community building. Communities are not fostered by fleeing established neighborhoods and homes that one (or preferably two) could raise children in for vanilla suburbs and a forty minute commute to work, entertainment, and shopping in another borough. Communities are built when individuals like you and I go out of our back doors and, instead of just waving, come to the back fence for a talk, or when we offer a hand carrying laden trash cans to the curb on Thursday nights. When we reach out and make our own little BFm's.