We must cooperate in order to compete with world commerce by establishing stronger local commerce .
I am suggesting free market cooperation by smaller merchants to create small city-towns with viable cultural strength.
The largeness of modern commerce and the anonymity of undue mobility makes us all lose culturally and economically.
The virtue placed on "competition", to the undue exclusion of "cooperation" and local accountability has hurt our culture. Economic growth in our non-communities is not tied to staying in one place and trading with one another, thus developing culture, but in moving about, selling and shipping long distances, while always paying for the same mass marketed products everywhere. This sort of economy and cultural pattern does not benefit the small, family owned business, the local hardware store, etc. It benefits the Walmarts selling stuff made in China. Thus more people are employed by big business and in turn dependent on it as a life-time pattern, and cannot develop their own indigenous commercial strength through small business and local commerce and localized intergenerational and intracultural loans and supports.
Because over time communites failed to cooperate, corporations beat them out with their superior cooperation within their ranks. For many people the corporation they worked for became their most essential community.
The word "community" used to refer to a local marketplace, an area of local commerce primarily. Now, it refers to banal places of boring sameness like suburbs and "gated communities" and condos and yuppie villages where wealthy, usually older people live in semi-retirement or complete retirement. The young people meet no one there, so they must go to another "community", the coeducation college. If they don't meet someone in college, perhaps they will meet them in the corporate "community" or the professional "community" of like minded (brainwashed?) people. They work in the corporate "community" and commute long distances from the condominium "community", occasionally "getting away" to a cabin outside the "commercial community". Later, they retire and "get away" to some ridiculous segregated retirement "community". If they were living right, and investing right, with a better balance and a better plan of cultural continuity and togetherness, they wouldn't have to "get away", one would think. They would live out their golden years with a truer glory than a golf-course- they would be surrounded by the community they had helped to build.
Corporations with their vast outposts of jobs do supply freedom or "mobility" for romantic interest for aging young singles, but tend to create difficulties for them as married people who want to settle down and raise children. Thus, as they get a little older some try to start their own small business, but in a "community-less community" and "culture-less culture" that is inherently geared toward the advantages of corporate commerce rather than local commerce.
The decline of small town values and the growth of agribusiness led to an undue emphasis on higher education which encouraged unrealistic career expectations accompanied by a decline of "humble" communities and of marriage. There was the congested "hype" growth of cities and suburbs and the economic decline of rural towns. Many pursued higher degrees only to find themselves without a job because there were not enough people to teach and feed into the high culture pyramid. The growth of corporations also bottled up people in cities where a ceiling of true growth was disguised by myriad "hype" growth in essentially non productive areas of education and entertainment and "fullfillment", feeding on and benefiting from the stress on marriage culture, the most essentially "local" commercial structure. This growth had many middlemen, and carried with it a high cost of living and a high overhead for real estate and office space as well as property tax as commercial "vitality" pretended to make property values appreciate. It was as though a huge "pyramid scheme" had occured in the corporations, the educational institutions, the arts, and the entertainments. These companies, with their superior cooperation among their members, have effectively competed with our communities that lacked cooperation among themselves, and thus have built up pyramidal economic structures supporting high mobility and an overall sense of non-community in our culture.
We need to create new city-towns through business partnerships with numerous other small businesses, with large groups of individuals commiting themselves together to relocate together at about the same time. In this way they can create markets amongst themselves. Smaller merchants and service companies can band together, not only for commercial, but also for cultural strength. They can encourage the kind of economic growth that will benefit the family and community rather than tear it apart.
People ought to invest in communities, in cheap real estate together, rather than in big companies on the stock market exchange. They ought to form their own companies in conjunction with other companies in new communities, rather than work for the corporations in metro areas where they must pay a high price for real estate in "prime locations" or must commute long distances to the exclusion of family and community life.
More small business, more localized agricultural trade must charactarize these new communities. Our marriage culture, to survive, must see more movement into less populated areas open for economic development. This must be organized by groups of small companies and their employees, rather than by big bisinesses. Large corporate companies have their own demographic plan, one that always seems to create a new noncommunity.
Small businesses can commit to move together and thus can empower one another significantly. They can stop paying the middle man for rented space for high overhead businesses and buy low cost space, if enough other "little guys" get on board.
It is time to compete with these corporate bosses who retire to gated country club retirement communities. After all, these guys know how to get cheap land and have their "communities" built there for them by cheap local contractors. But these are not communities in the traditional sense of mutual trade societies surrounded by nearby agricultural support. They are "getaways", the modern moat of uncrossable economic passage, created by world commerce, supplying a pitance to the local indentured servants who shop at their Walmarts and fast food restuarants and build their homes rather than their own.
The true community is built by older men of wealth or of moderate wealth, men of forsight and cultural vision, who channel their economic strength into their sons, and into their neighbor's good as well, who by neighborly and familial love support the community and the marriage institution. These with cultural vision may yet learn for the common good to encourage their daughters to marry young and then return to education and work a few years into their marriage. They will help their sons-in-law to get established in developing communities where fresh competition can beat out the cultural disintegration, economic inflation and hype of highly populated areas such as the "megalopolis" we have in the northeast of our United States.
All this empowerment occurs when people are culturally awake, aware of their responsibility to "love their neighbor" and are beginning to understand how this relates to the economic and cultural health of their communities. They know that forming new communities in less populated areas with an emphasis on local agriculture and local commerce is the way to compete with the polluting and commuting non-communities of our modern cities and commutervilles. Our modern cities are congested within, surrounded by commuters without, and dependent on long distance shipping abroad. They are dependent on markets throughout the world rather than those close at hand. They rely upon big companies, chain stores, agribusinesses and all sorts of "bigness". Such structures have a built-in limit to growth. They have a psycologically deadening effect on many, keeping them coming to them rather than trading with one another elsewhere.
The older generation needs to substantially invest in their children's marriages, giving thoughtful planning and counsel, as well as money. If they do, economic growth will occur, so that the children will be able to repay the parents. The older generation should invest in the younger, and in new communites and new businesses, with a view to a return on their investment. This is completely a different model than what is typically done today. The parents send their kids to school, which is an investment in them to be sure, but they also invest in the stock market- in the large structures already in place, empowering them further, not realizing that these very structures are competing with smaller structures, with the community and even the family itself.
Start a bulliten board commenting on this subject.
I read about a small town in Iowa years ago that was willing to PAY married people with children to relocate there, because they did'nt have enough children to keep their schools open. Such towns should create web sites, chat rooms, and bulliten boards- "virtual" communities that will prepare people to eventually commit themselves to real ones.
Marriage Culture - What is Wrong?
Marriage Culture - Its History
Dating Violence
