An American Community

As I sit and write from the small village in Maine where I am practicing 'Me Here Now', I recall my last year here in 1974 when after dropping out of college in NY state I moved up to Maine.
Somewhere in my youthful mind, I took some of the Fire my Father had endowed me with and tried to put together my philosophy of Life. This was not a disciplined undertaking, there are no
papers that I wrote on the subject or even tried to write. I pieced together what I had taken from observation, with an eye on my father Reverend Meyer's persistent vision of a 'New World Movement'. A vision that he tirelessly strove to launch, his philosophy of World Community, World Government, World Peace a vision fashioned by his times, his parents (from the World War I experience in their revulsion of the massive loss of lives on all sides with with the accompanying National patriotic -----) his heroes (Ghandi, Thoreau), his geography New England (Transcendentalism, the spiritual fervor of the Puritan Heritage in it's best representations, think - Roger Williams founder of Rhode Island Colony). From his own mind just as I filtered all that came to me in a philosophy, a framework of understanding, in my mind.

What I came up with, influenced somehow, by my teenage years in the 1960's in America, was that in my country, the US, the only country that I had experience of, there was nothing as important as community, for the health of society, for the health of individuals. That any movement to expand the greater good for the World is better served and might best achieve positive lasting results if it is rooted in our own sense of Community and not just an intellectual response but of the tangible connections that keep us alive. Connections that translate into the work of individuals, our neighbors, whether we know them or not.

In the more than half a century of my life, the American Community has stubbornly resisted
as well as practically adapted to the forces of change. We are a living entity, most of us behave as humans trying to to what's best for us and our families. The American people may not all be like myself, or at least sometimes as how I perceive myself, ready for ranting and raving, even in a polite civilized manner, striving to change the world to his or her imagined sense of a greater justice as we all slide to a greater injustice. The young man who tells me sure he would take the money and build some monstrous mansion on top of a scenic hill for the happiness of some exceedingly wealthy human. Sure he would, and we will build more roads, and pave more marshes and fields as we strive to grow the economy not for some altruistic goal or vision but to simply provide for what seems our immediate needs. We are in a tough bind in the US and throughout the world with the pressures of population and with our economic system grown as it has into this centralized wealth machine where the ordinary American can aspire to acquire vast holdings of property for his own betterment. In my opinion at the cost of local communities and individuals. Everything is a commodity, everything can be monetized and if you can control the distribution of any goods you can become rich.

Is that bad? Are their alternatives? Where are we going with our economy and will a 'new currency' emerge at the local level if our centralized system collapses.
The American Community exists we are who we are. It is what it is. The language of our times accurately says we are here, yet what we are and what we are going through .. can we find some common ground of agreement that describes roughly where we are and what we are faced with? Many people try, many books are written, many articles are written. It's a challenge and here I am trying to throw my two cents in there as well....