Here is an excellent reflection on community and human life. It looks at the other side of our "successes" and "exceptionalism." It explores the unhappiness we all feel, but are terrified to look at, and consider the sense of community that we destroyed. I quoted a few important points, because so many have lost the ability to read and concentrate beyond marketing slogans.
"I am not alone in failing to find American locales where the images of Winners and Losers, Gentrified and Moochers have not overwhelmed values and beliefs indifferent to such. The middle class in America is living on the fumes of former security and well-being, faint memories of not yearning for what we are, each second now, stimulated to yearn for. We have given up communal concerns and investments in each other. We have given up a variety of ways of being in the world in a variety of different places. We have given up a plentitude of close relationships with nature and each other and have bought a gated, privatized isolation that defends us from each other, an anonymous virulence and cold-hearted mockery and disdain for those "below" us. What has been erased is the humanity of the human life world, a sad fate we subliminally recognize. Such recognition explains our drive toward a robotic technology that will extract the human. We are not in love with what we have become.
It's a terrible cultural imaginary we now live within, and both my West Virginia and my Brooklyn have been casualties, not simply because we are very far from taking any societal action to relieve poverty anywhere or because Brooklyn is now becoming a District 9 sort of place where the ungentrified are very rapidly been uprooted and enclosed, like public schools now colonized by charter schools financed by Hedge Fund managers. What is most objectionable is the destruction of lifestyles that had greater merit, greater humanity, greater equality, neighborliness, social identity than the Winner/Loser/Gentrified/Ungentrified cultural imaginary that now filters all our perceptions. Call it the loss of existential habitat, the usurpation of a communal life-world built on values and meanings by a culture dominated by market values. What has been dissolved now leaves only poverty to be seen."
"The middle class is in shards, their neighborhoods open season to invading hordes of gentrifiers, or left to rot, like the once-vibrant neighborhoods of Detroit. Rich, fertile and sustaining framings of everyday life, ways of imagining yourself and your neighbors, have been demolished like old buildings standing in the way of new multi-purpose real estate developments - high-priced condos, high-end shopping and new haute dining.
A scourging and burning, raping and pillaging of our former communal imaginaries, of what I lived within in both Borough Park and Oxl'ey Hollow, stands as the most criminal, stands to be the most indictable. Appalachian life-worlds and "un-gentrified" Brooklyn neighborhoods that signified much more than being impoverished, which did not bend to a measurement of Have and Have Not, are black boxes to an imaginary that has no imagination, that hears no pings from a ravaged nature or a democratic egalitarianism now mocked."
