Our economic indicators register the use of the fuel that moves a car but not a person walking or biking to work. We keep statistics on the food that people buy but not the food that they grow for themselves. A grandmother canning beans and talking to kids is not valued in our GNP. A grandmother canning beans and talking to kids is a complex of benefits that we haven't valued, perhaps because they are too complex. This is where our culture should be passed on; grandma telling stories while engaged in meaningful work for the family, the kids plugged in to their heritage instead of a tv. This is where our culture has broken down.

         The destruction of our communities and families has been an industrial process. When society was based on farmers and merchants the whole family could help in the provision of sustenance. When wage and job replaced farm and shop the focus of enterprise left the home and family and went to work in the factory. Under the pressure of industrialization even farms became more like factories and shops became chains and superstores. Schools took children away from the home environment and too often became education factories. Granny is put in the old folks home and people eat beans from California that were canned in a big factory, if they eat beans at all. Factories have factored and fractured our society to pieces. Consumerism has consumed us. Granny becomes a registered trademark and a picture on the side of an oatmeal cookie package. Prosperity, it turns out, is a whole lot more than jobs.

          Most of us use cars now for getting to work, school, shopping, recreation and various other elements of our lives. Because of this, our communities have become dislocated. Neighbors, for the most part, know each other less now, and our friendships are increasingly with people who live at a distance. Ideally our communities should offer work, school, shopping, recreation and other amenities within walking distance. This would save a lot of gas, there would be much less air water and noise pollution , and we would save huge ammounts of time and money. Harder to measure but perhaps more important would be the social well being that would result from more people focusing more of their lives in the places where they live.

          We have gone in living memory from extended family to nuclear family to one parent family and now some zero parent families. We are like stable and beautifully complex organic molecules being broken down to individual atoms and then unstable elements in the super-collider of our industrial society. Families, neighborhoods and cultures are living beings who we are part of but unconscious of in just the way that we are unconscious of the lives of the millions of living entities which make up our physical bodies. Synergy is the principal that the whole is greater than the sum of parts, and all living systems use this basic law. We have, in many ways, come a part. A healthy neighborhood can take care of children and old people to the great benefit of all concerned. A functioning community looks after its own with the organic surety inherant to all life forms. Life is a local effort.

          Communism tried to legislate cooperation from the top down. This is unnatural and it sure didn't work. Cooperation grows upward from the bottom and is naturally understood on family and local levels. Russia, Ukraine and all the rest of them are going through a process of rapid decentralization. When these countries come back it will be from the ground up, community by community. In this country our love of competition has sometimes blinded us to the fact that cooperation plays a much bigger role in our day to day lives. Local cooperation is becoming more important here also, since our national economy has been undermined and our debt load will inevitably lead to a diffusion of real power back to localities as the federal and state levels lose their ability to deal with problems.

         The world's population has been shifting towards big cities for hundreds of years but even today small rural villages are home to nearly half of the human population. Many of the new city dwellers can't find work and live in wretched conditions whereas in rural villages, people can at least grow most of their own food. Recent advances in telecommunications mean that physically remote places need not be culturally isolated. The deteriorating conditions in the cities combined with new technologies are pushing and pulling us towards a world in which most people once again live in small rural communities, but this time as part of a global society. This global society will not be a mono-culture. It will be a framework by and for a multicultural humanity. The new global culture will protect individual cultures from the forced amalgamation that has been practiced up to this point.

          A return to village life will not mean an return to pre-industrial conditions. A modern village will have the amenities of the suburbs but this will be courtesy of local power sources and efficient design. In the future, small rural villages will combine the best of the ancient and stable social structures with the best of technology for a standard of living that is well above where we are today. People will grow much of their own food, produce much of their own power, help each other to build homes. Our health care system will mostly be made up of caring friends and family who have access to a worldwide computer diagnostic databanks and medicines. Likewise, our schools will be smaller than they are now but with access to planetary information networks. Work will be vitally important and psychologically fulfilling in ways that 9 to 5 jobs often are not, and we will realize the social and economic benefit of grandmas, grandpas, and everyone. People have always lived in basic local cooperative patterns and any other way of life is very recent and experimental. The disjointed and disorganized social patterns that we see around us today are temporary by their very nature. Perhaps it has been necessary for us to break down our social systems in order to re-form them into more harmonious patterns. Love is the gravitational force that binds us together into family, community and planetary unity, and fortunately love is alive and well. We will, in time, pull ourcellves together under its constant good influence.