When folks ask how many people live in New Sharon, I usually give a two-part answer. About 200 people live here, but about 1,400 sleep here.

In other words, six in seven people with bedrooms in New Sharon conduct their lives somewhere else. They work in Farmington, Lewiston, Waterville. But not in New Sharon. And for many, their work is their life. They shop in those other places or at a computer screen, not in New Sharon. Some travel all week and just come here on the weekend. Stopping to shop on the way.

No wonder some people here feel we are losing our sense of community.

Wendell Berry, who is surely among America’s keenest thinkers, has written that the first requirement of community is that you can’t get out of it. Berry’s writing teems with folks who live noble lives, making the best of where they are. They stay where they were born or reared or had settled when they married. Place determines community, and everyone in town is part of the community. No one can get out of it.

I can think of no better example of a community built around place than this example from 1949 in New Sharon. Fire destroyed the town’s schoolhouse for the third time in 24 years. The community effort to rebuild attracted the CBS radio program, “The People Act.” CBS aired a half hour about the town uniting to build a cinder-block building that would never burn — and it hasn’t— after three wooden K-12 buildings had burned. CBS interviewed New Sharon folks who chipped in with labor, cut and hauled lumber to the site, held fund-raisers. The school committee cobbled together financing, donations, a $10,000 grant and gifts in kind to get the needed $60,000. Newcomers and visitors aren’t here long before they hear the story of building the schoolhouse.

Though I wasn’t here at the time, I swell with admiration for my neighbors when I listen to my tape of “The People Act.” My neighbors had taken on the responsibility to build a local schoolhouse. Yet place alone as a definition of community is going, going, gone.

It’s easy to mourn the loss of that sort of community, and I do. The people Wendell Berry writes about, fiction and non-fiction alike, take responsibility for their community, Port William, Kentucky, in the case of his fiction. (Berry lives in Port Royal, Kentucky, so the veil of fiction may lie pretty thin over his characters.)

Most folks feel no need to duck into a local (or any) church, synagogue or mosque. When they don’t stop in, they don’t put anything into the collection plate. The money in that plate helps to support the church, to be sure. But some of it also goes to neighbors who need temporary help, a few bucks to buy heating oil for someone down on her luck — didn’t Verso recently make permanent the layoff of another 120 people? — or to feed a young family when the breadwinner has a crippling accident at work. The people who avoid church have their reasons, but one result is that they don’t pick up this wee bit of responsibility for neighbors in need.

David Brooks wrote in The New York Times that people find it easy to bail these days. This new and widespread trend further undercuts community. The so-called social media makes it easy to say yes and just as easy later to say no, to accept responsibility and then renege. It’s easy to sign up, say, to take a bean casserole to a fund-raising supper. Just send or answer a text. And, it’s just as easy to bail on that promise the night before the supper. Simply send another text. That’s why I prefer to call them the anti-social media.

“My presence or absence won’t be noticed” at a wedding, funeral, graduation, Brooks wrote. No one will notice if I don’t take the responsibility to pay my respects.

But Brooks said that idea is 180 degrees off, and I can tell you he is right. In June, I hosted a funeral I would rather have put off for 20 years, and more than 100 people turned out to honor my wife. I don’t keep a list of folks who didn’t show. But I now see people she and I knew in spectrums of those who came to honor Marilyn and those who didn’t. Those present were noticed, just as Brooks had predicted, as were those absent.

Today, people who take responsibility for the health of a town, church, charity, club, etc., may be building new communities, at least when they don’t bail at the last minute.

I’m starting to test this idea of responsibility. Do I feel responsible enough to my town to serve in elected positions? Yes. School director and now select board. Do I feel responsible for some of my neighbors’ well-being? Yes. By tithing my Social Security check with my church and by voting when requests come to the church for emergency help. So, community through my faith.

Do I feel responsible for the good done by music and sports programs in the local schools? No, not really. Good programs all. But, I’m just not in that community. Do I feel responsibility for the programs of the Boy Scouts of America? I was, after all, one merit badge shy of becoming a Life Scout when I aged out. But no, I don’t feel responsible for Scouting. I’m just not in that community.

Berry’s obligatory community worked well for a long time, and it is possible that people who knew they couldn’t escape it put their shoulders to the wheel to help make those communities work. But voluntary communities may be stronger. If a community is easy to leave, those who stay will be those who want to be there.

Community may be widening, away from place and toward other reasons to take responsibility. How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve Googled the earth? How wide is your community? For how many communities are you willing to take some responsibility?

Bob Neal is among the 200 or so folks who live in New Sharon. He and his late wife Marilyn and their two sons settled there in 1980.       

Copy the Story Link