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Excerpt

LOSS OF COMMUNITY

At one time there was no such problem, when you were known within family, including the extended family of relatives. When family became tribe and tribes villages, their members still knew each other to a large degree. Neighbors, friends, and family freely intermingled, were often one and the same. There wasn't much alternative. One lived, worked, and died among a small number of familiar faces. One was born into community and belonged automatically; the only alternative to belonging would be to leave.

An Englishman I know grew up in such a small village in Yorkshire. he says the most striking quality of the town, and the thing he misses most, was the feeling of being known there. He said it wasn't even a spoken thing. Nobody would say anything out loud about you shouting at your wife. But they knew, you knew they knew, they knew you knew they knew -- and in that there was comfort.

There are problems with that kind of life, to be sure. Oppression and gossip. Rigidity. I wouldn't want it. My English friend had fled it. But at least it was an existence where people knew who you were. It was a community.

Today we talk about our "loss of community" in city and suburb. Often we discuss it intellectually while sipping scotch. Sometimes mystically, passing a joint. Or nostalgically over beer.

Loss of community. That seems to cover the sense of being isolated and unknown, but when we try to pin it down, the term is elusive. We talk of the neighborhood community, the academic community, the world community, or just the community.

When we try to be more specific about just what "community" means, we usually think first of a place, the place where we live. I think this is what Carnation Milk has in mind when they implore me on their carton to "help keep our community litter free."

But when we consider where we find a "sense of community," it's rarely where we live. .We use the word interchangeably, but it means two different things.

A sense of community is what we find among the people who know us, with whom we feel safe. That rarely includes the neighbors.

It wasn't always so. For most of history man found his sense of community where he lived, with the people among whom he was born and with whom he died. For some that remains true today. But most of us in city and suburb live one place, and find "community" in another. Or nowhere.

So many of us want back the intimate sense of community, the one where the grocer knew our name and the butcher could comment on meat and life.