Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 25, 1993 TAG: 9305250627
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILL BASON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Neither the grandmother canning beans and telling stories nor the kids snapping while they listen are measured in our gross national product. A grandmother canning beans and talking to kids is a pattern that positively affects the health, wealth and self-esteem of everyone involved. Home work is a complex benefit that we have ignored in favor of the far simpler monetary view of economic reality.
The destruction of our communities and families has been an industrial process. When society was based on farmers and merchants, the whole family cooperated in the provision of sustenance. When wage and job replaced farm and shop, the focus of enterprise left the home and family, and went to work in the factory. Under the pressures of industrialization, even farms became more like factories, and shops became chains and superstores.
Schools took children away from the home environment and too often became education factories. Granny is put in the old-folks home, and people eat beans (if they eat beans at all) canned in a big factory in California. Factories have factored our society to pieces. Consumerism has consumed us. Granny becomes a registered trademark and a picture on the side of an oatmeal-cookie package.
We have gone in living memory from extended family to nuclear family to one-parent family and now some zero-parent families. We have come apart. Families, neighborhoods and cultures are living beings whom we are part of, but unconscious of. A healthy neighborhood takes care of children and old people to the great benefit of all concerned. A functioning community looks after its own with the organic surety of all life forms.
Most of us use cars now for getting to work, school, shopping, recreation and various other elements of our lives. Because of this, our communities have become dislocated. Neighbors, for the most part, know each other less now. Our commerce increasingly is with people who live at a distance.
An ideal community offers work, school, shopping, recreation and other amenities within walking distance. The reduced automobile use would pay us huge dividends in saved money and a cleaner environment. Harder to measure but perhaps more important would be the social well-being that would result if more people focused more of their lives in the places where they live.
The population has been moving to big cities for hundreds of years, but even today small rural villages are home to nearly half the human population. In rural villages, people can grow most of their own food and house themselves, but in cities hundreds of millions are unemployed and in wretched conditions.
Recent advances in transportation and especially in telecommunications mean that rural locations are much less isolated. The deteriorating conditions in the cities, combined with new technologies, are pushing and pulling us toward a future in which most people once again will live in small rural communities, but this time with a global awareness. The world community will form a Framework for a multicultural humanity. The emerging global culture will protect individual cultures from the forced amalgamation that has been practiced up to this point.
Communism tried to legislate cooperation from the top down. This is unnatural, and it sure didn't work.
Cooperation grows upward from the bottom and is naturally understood on family and local levels. The old Eastern bloc is leading the way in a worldwide wave of radical decentralization. Many localities are coping for themselves surprisingly well in the economic vacuum left by the collapse of old and incompetent agencies.
This, of course, could never happen here. In this country, our love of competition has sometimes blinded us to the fact that cooperation plays a much bigger role in our day-to-day lives.
A return to village life will not mean a return to the life of before the industrial revolution. A modern village will have the amenities of the suburbs but this will be courtesy of local power sources and efficient design.
In the future, small rural villages will combine the best of the ancient and stable social structures with the best of technology for a standard of living that is well above today's. People will grow much of their own food, produce much of their own power, and help each other build homes.
Our health-care system will mostly be made up of caring friends and family who have access to a worldwide computer diagnostic database and medicines. Likewise, our schools will be smaller than now but with access to world information resources via satellite and computer networks.
Work will be real, vitally important and psychologically fulfilling in ways that 9-to-5 jobs usually are not, and we will realize the social and economic benefit of grandmas, grandpas and everyone else. This is basically the way people have always lived. The disjointed and disorganized social patterns that we see around us today are transitional by their very nature.
Perhaps it has been necessary for us to break down our society in order to improve it. Love is the gravitational force that binds us together into family, community and planetary structure. Fortunately, love is alive and well, and we will reform ourselves under its constant good influence.
Will Bason lives and works in Floyd County.
by CNB