Get a Sense of Community and Life in a Small Town

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Anyone who travels around America these days can’t help noticing the great advance of suburban sprawl—the bewildering webs of highways with malls at all their intersections, the vast quadrants of land given over to residential and commercial constructions that seem indistinguishable from each other.

To my eyes this growing chunk of America is ugly in its dullness, dull in its ugliness. But never mind aesthetics. You know all those places must possess distinctive characteristics and even beauty beneath their surfaces, because those places do sustain abundant human life. What seems weird about them is how they hinder what most people have in mind when they use the term community—the expression of basic human yearnings for coherence and connectedness. The design of the modern American landscape guarantees that each activity of daily living is a fifteen-minute drive from every other one.

Examples of an older kind of shell for living still exist, of course, in certain towns or pieces of towns and in some urban neighborhoods. Not the theme parks or the planned and gated communities that conform to nostalgic visions of a small-town life that never existed. But places that have evolved and continue to evolve, places that in basic ways resemble the small towns and neighborhoods that many Americans wished to get away from, not all that long ago. Here are some of the qualities that the term “community” inside such communities does not imply: that all the inhabitants like each other or are likeable, that sad and even terrible events never happen, that everyone agrees on what is best for the place, or that everyone cares about that question. Small-town life still carries special liabilities. If you do all your growing up in the same small locale, you run the risk of retaining all your nicknames and the identities that go with them. By the time you come to adulthood you’re apt to be so well known by the people around you that you can never really be known at all. You feel the power of rumor and gossip, encouraging conformity by punishing transgressions. And sooner or later something you really don’t like is apt to happen very close to home, and when it does, it will seem inescapable. You’ll feel like a modern airplane traveler, jammed in a narrow seat, stuck for company with the people fate has placed beside you, except that you are there for life.