As if we can't find enough

to argue about, Dave and I occasionally debate the causes of the Decline

of Community.

The part we agree on is that

the bonds between neighbors have eroded in our lifetime. It is now newsworthy

when people take over lawn-mowing and home maintenance for a neighbor

recovering from devastating injuries. In previous generations, such care

would have been assumed.

We grew up in middle-class

neighborhoods of front porches, sidewalks, parks, vacant lots where kids

could make up softball teams or play hide-and-go-seek (only we called

it "hidey-go") in the twilight.

Where people knew each other,

and whose kids were whose. Where post office and library, school and church,

were within walking distance, and where you knew your kids would be followed,

not by predators, but by the eyes of neighbors who cared.

So what has happened to Community?

Urban sprawl and America's love affair with the car, say I. Americans

park their cars within the four walls of their homes or under roofs mere

steps from their doors. They get in, push buttons to open garage doors

and lock car doors, turn on the radio to deaden their senses to anyone

or anything around them, and travel in their own little bubbles to their

work places.

There, they reverse the steps:

They pull into the company parking decks and ride in elevators to their

offices, where they may greet other humans for the first time today. "Good

morning, Ralph. Nice day, huh?"

How would they know? They have

not experienced weather except visually, so that is not really a shared

moment, nor have they spoken to a neighbor or a fellow commuter, except

perhaps by gesture.

All right, I'm painting an

extreme picture to make a point, but odds are Americans interact less

with neighbors who eat and sleep a few yards away than with those they

encounter at the work place.

We travel the same way, and

if you doubt it, follow a car full of our overweight, under-exercised

compatriots along a road like the breathtakingly beautiful Blue Ridge

Parkway. Windows up, A.C. on, stereo blaring, they peer through glass

at a vista of impossible greens, an ever-changing skyscape crisscrossed

hear or feel anything.

At each overlook, they pull

over, evacuate the car, snap off a few frames at least when they get home,

they'll see where they've been and then it's back in their steel cocoon

to the next stop. The first such overlook might take a minute, and involves

the entire carload.

driver no longer bothers to get out, and after that, there seems to be

a designated photographer, thus cutting the pit stop to a neat 15 seconds

or so. Other sightseers are ignored by those insulated in their car.

I say cars caused the degradation

of community. Dave disagrees. It was air conditioning that "ruined

the South," as he loves to put it. The South is growing faster than

any other region of the country except, perhaps, California, and it sure

wouldn't have happened without air conditioning.

Take central Florida, he says,

and I bite my tongue not to add, "Please." "When I was

a kid growing up, there was nothing there but scrub palmetto and mosquitoes.

Nobody in their right mind would go there. Then along comes air conditioning

and look at it now: Disney World.

"Air conditioning opened

up the South to Yankees. And everybody stays in the house."

He's right. Life in the South

would be unthinkable without "air" in our homes, cars, businesses,

schools. Before A.C., people really did sit on porches in hopes of an

evening breeze, and so did their neighbors, and sooner or later, conversations

were struck up, acquaintances ripened into friendships, caring began.

Kids found playing outdoors preferable to sweltering indoors. Besides,

what was there to do indoors? Watch TV? Play computer games?

Which leads to other possibilities

in this blame game. Television is often cited as a destroyer of community,

because it allows us to be entertained without venturing out of our homes

or God forbid! sitting in a room full of strangers to watch a play.

True. But I'd argue that television

builds community on a national scale. How else would people from coast

to coast know to care for a small shark-bitten boy in Florida, or to respond

to the needs of flood victims in the Midwest? What else would enable us

to choke up with pride as we watch the triumph of a Lance Armstrong or

a women's soccer team?

It goes beyond our shores.

Just ask the new parents of children adopted from one of the eastern European

nations ravaged by conflict. Chances are they learned of these kids' fate

Urban sprawl. Cars. Air conditioning.

There are more candidates for this discussion, but I'd be interested in

your take. Has Community declined? Or has it merely morphed into something

different?

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