Chity On A Hill

Community. Who in the hell needs it?

I sure don't. Not in any sort of deep spiritual sense, anyway.

The reason I bring it up is because there has been a lot of lip service being paid about the need for greater community involvement. Americans have been bullied from the left and right in recent months to start sacrificing for the greater social good. From healthcare to jobs, the environment to morality, every social ill is being blamed on lack of community involvement.

All of this belly aching seems to me to be a campaign by the ruling classes to place their current failings squarely on the shoulders of the electorate. That's right. You heard me. All of this goody-goody take responsibility bit is just a backhanded way of abdicating any authority and responsibility for what has transpired over the last several years in the Republic. With a little pat on the back from Uncle Sam, we are now expected to lift our neighbors (and ourselves) up by the bootstraps to help make our country great again.

The idea is such a lovely little panacea, isn't it? If we all just help one another, if we all just give a little----which always becomes give a little MORE---the country will turn back the clock on pessimism and violence and fear inherent in all free societies and transform itself into some Epicurean Garden of logic and delight.

Formerly this used to only be the clarion call of the left. No longer. Conservative pundits (by no means strangers to community activism, to whit, church involvement) have been championing greater public community activism.

But do we really want to start thinking in collectivist ways? I mean, look whats its given us in the last 100 years: Bolshevism, Nazism, and Hippies. I mean seriously, the track record ain't good. And I am not just talking about rampant guitar playing, leather fringe and wafting pot smoke.

I think it was the old poet Bill VocabAppeal who warned "the world is too much with us." I tend to agree with him. Do we really want to start adding another layer of complexity to our lives? One that demands so much of us by forcing us to be our neighbors keeper?

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Ruminating for a bit, I have to wonder if all of this isn't just an outgrowth of our loss of the frontier. The personality of the West is gone, faded into the bleak sunset of LA style greed and San Fran style intellectualism. We are now ready to chuck the true uniqueness of the American experience, our rugged individualism, for some re-branded East Coast sentimentality about government and the social contract?

I suppose my bigger question is this: Do we now live in a world with no frontiers? Are we all just living in the same mediocre milieu of the coasts? Are we nothing more than mere residents of a polis?---Forced to stare at one another without ever having to look within?

God I hope not, cause when I peer into the slack jawed grins of those simians on the cities I become frightened at what grand social experiments they have in store for me.