The fabric of our society is unraveling, but we are Americans, and we can stop that unraveling and begin “sewing the repairs,” if you will.
It was a crops farm upon a few dozen acres of upland surrounded by swamp (yes, I am a genuine “Swamp Yankee”) in a little New England town that made Andy Griffith’s Mayberry look like Manhattan. My mother died when I was two, and when my WWII Marine father looked at me, he may have seen a glimpse of my mother. He seldom raised his voice to me, let alone spank me (in the days when most children were spanked!). When I was 12, he built a little cabin in the woods behind our house for me and my friends so I could grow up carefree. This scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade makes me tear up, because it sounds like my father talking.
Did I get away with much? Not in THAT town. Everyone knew my dad. He was a Selectman, which also made him a police commissioner. Any dangerous or destructive shenanigans were sure to get back to him. On the other hand, folks would give us kids a ride if they saw us walking somewhere, and the nurse who lived across the cornfield would patch up my inevitable cuts and bumps. I was raised to call our closest neighbors “Aunt Betty” or “Uncle Joe.” So long as I kept my grades up and our only full-time cop, Hubie, didn’t have to stop by and have a chat with my father too often on my account, I was free to come and go as I pleased.
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville cited the New England town meeting as a source from which American exceptionalism sprang. We had one every year, where the town’s citizens themselves were their own legislature. These could be entertaining to say the least. This scene from Blazing Saddles brings back fond memories. For years my father was up on the stage with his fellow selectmen, the town’s only lawyer (with whom I would later apprentice) serving as moderator. When I came of age, I played a minor role as planning board member. There wasn’t much to plan, but I got to march in the Memorial Day parades along with my dad.
Russell Kirk pointed out decades ago that there are only two alternatives to these extended families of voluntary association: atomic individualism, or compulsory collectivism.
This was a town where Burke’s “little platoons” and Tocqueville’s “associations” grew like weeds. Burke saw these “platoons” as cultivating the natural desire God placed in mankind to be in communion with one another. As Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, we are made to cooperate with each other as hands are to feet. The larger attachments, love of country, and regard for humanity in general, spring from these “platoons” and do not arrive sua sponte. Russell Kirk pointed out decades ago that there are only two alternatives to these extended families of voluntary association: atomic individualism, or compulsory collectivism.
We see the consequences of atomic individualism all around us: loneliness, suicide, despair, depression and general hopelessness (Frank has often written upon this subject, see his latest on Gen Z loneliness). Some call this “freedom,” but it is, as John Adams called it, “the freedom of the wolf.” As for compulsory collectivism (a position approached by the far-left today) we need only look to the 20th century horrors of Nazism, Mao’s cultural revolution, or Cambodia’s killing fields for just a few examples of where that road can lead.
The fabric of our society is unraveling, but we are Americans, and we can stop that unraveling and begin “sewing the repairs,” if you will. It can start right outside your front door. If you have kids, go outside, push them ahead of you, and leave the electronics behind. Maybe get a dog and walk around, or go to a local dog park. You’d be surprised how many neighbors you will meet that have dogs, or just want to get acquainted with yours. Join and support a local church, civic organization or charity doing much that is good in your neighborhood. Find out who might be elderly or in need of a friend. Find what Frank calls a good “Third Place” beyond work and home, where spontaneous connections are made, much as they were in the iconic “Cheers” bar. Erosion is slow but certain. Our local communities are our foundation, and it needs shoring up, if we are to continue to be what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”
David Churchill Barrow is a Massachusetts “Swamp Yankee” descendant of William Bradford and Myles Standish of Pilgrim fame, who grew up on a farm that has not been sold since first built in the early 1700s. In that farmhouse still hangs the commission of James Churchill as a captain in the Massachusetts militia signed by John Hancock, and the sword of Thomas Churchill, a Navy engineer who served in the Blockade of the Confederacy. He met his wife, MaryLu, in high school. They were married in 1979 and have three adult children. MaryLu is a former elementary school teacher. Today they live just outside Tampa, Fla. They are the authors of And Justice for All, Even Redcoats, and are working on their next novel about the Pilgrims. David also writes for PJ Media.
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