Confession of My Privilege

 America is full of phony non-communities, and people are sick of them. Even most small towns suck, as does rural America. They are overrun with the world and every is split up into boxes just like everywhere else.  American communities disintegrated in the 1970s. I saw it happening and I was horrified. I saw a nation of communities that had existed up to the time I was born was going away, being eaten alive year by year. As a child I saw it receding into history.

The only way you get community in America past your college years is to be in a nursing home. In between, we are on our own, unless you have family. People without family are in a very precarious situation in our society. 

I have been so very, very fortune to see what I did get to see, and live what I did get to live in my life.  So you want a confession of privilege. I'll give you one. I may well have been the most privileged individual ever to have been born on Earth.

I'm not saying I was born into a situation of perfect advantages across the board, the way you might think. For examples, my parents were broken and horrible with money, and we suffered greatly because of that, but only in a relative sense. We were living in the most perfect material conditions of peaceful that had existed on Earth, when disease was being eradicated through sanitation and other means. We could be kids without the threat of so many terrors that haunted previous generations, and continued to do so outside of the place I was born.

It was a golden time to be a kid. The old world had not yet been destroyed, although it was under attack, primarily through Pop Culture, which has fascinated me since I child, because I knew from six years old that Postmodern Pop Culture would ruin America. No one told me. I just figured it out. At the same time I loved Pop Culture and consumed it as much as any kid, in a sense of not wanting to be left out.

The people with whom I have resonated most strongly in life are ones who are of my age cohort or younger, and who were raised in a way took them out of the direct influence of a least a large chunk of Pop Culture. 

People like that could stick out as weird to those of us who were besotted by Pop Culture, but I always knew they were the sane ones. I bless their parents for the wisdom of having done this.

What was I saying about communities, and how America does not have ones anymore? We only have the simulation of community which is making everyone miserable and depressed. There is no solution to this within the framework of American society right now. No amount of communitarianism can possibly solve it. We've tried all that and it doesn't work because it is fighting architecture. It is fighting the technology we use.

The use of technology by a society tunes that society in a way that can seem obvious in hindsight. It is as if we have lose our innocence and find out what happens when you tinker with how people communicate with each other, both in a personal sense, and in mass communication.

Then we want to go back, because we lost a bunch of good things we didn't know could be lost.