What We Have Lost

We have lost a lot. My grandfather probably went to his favorite barber every other day to be shaved with a straight razor and to hear men's gossip. As a reporter and as founder of the New York Times Book Review, that was part of Clifford Smyth's job, but most men in towns participated in this kind of community, a community most of us have lost. This was true of women, too, with the corner hairdresser, and before that the village well. The Internet creates an "anonymous community" (an oxymoron), or one labeled by "user" names. We may be exchanging our immediate/intimate thoughts with people halfway around the world instead of halfway round the block; it's not the same.

What else have we lost? People used to play cards, or play instruments and sing together; perhaps they still do in some remoter parts of the US, and in other parts of the world. My wife gets together with two other women to sing occasionally, but with the idea of eventual performance, not just singing for the sheer joy of it. I discovered a whole collection of games in a window box; the computer printer was sitting on the lid, because few people play games anymore, especially with each other; they may play against themselves on their computer, or with anonymous others, on the Internet.

TV is not a substitute for what we have lost nor is the Internet, but community is difficult to grow and difficult to maintain in this wireless world. Perhaps that's the reason for things like Little League and the real reason that some churches have burgeoned; at least you can cheer and curse with fellow parents on Saturdays, and repent on Sundays. On Sundays, too, you can commiserate with others on the things we have lost, like the ordered values of yesteryear (that also segregated "colored" and "spics" beyond the pale of civilized intercourse.)

When my grandfather was bedridden (for 20 years!) he had many visitors, including nuns from the order founded by his wife's (my grandmother's) Aunt Rose (Rose Hawthorne who married Lathrop and later became Sister Alphonsa). During Prohibition, the nuns brought him bottles of Scotch (for "medicinal purposes").

Perhaps, if the world collapses, what we have lost will be recreated in different form. The collapse may come in any of many ways: meltdown of the dollar, environmental disaster, like the Greenland ice-dams breaking, peak oil and economic collapse, revolution, ice age, who knows. Perhaps then at least the survivors will regain something we have lost: community.

After all, without community no one will survive.