American Town Square – Sense of Community – Lost in the Modern Age?

I was totally struck by the statement in Russell Brand’s youthful POV in his Guardian article, about the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher and how she broke a “Sense of Community” along with the Coal Strikers in 1980’s Britain.

That the solidarity that got Britain through a World War with Satan and his minions literally breathing down their necks was the sense of community and sacrifice and blind hard work for the cause.

The Brits turned out Churchill after that war because they did all the heavy lifting in that war and created a sort of socialist state for the benefit of the many and or the all.

That ideas of Marx were not exclusively communist but like the earliest traditions of the Christian faith, a community based on common survival and shared sense of all.

I have written somewhere here or there how I thought of Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the Air Traffic Controller’s union as Conservative ideologue and not as fellow American being the root why we could not protect our skies twenty years later on September 11, 2001.  

That losing experience and sense of camaraderie and common purpose and sticking one’s neck out left us with a scooped out pale reflection of an air controller’s network that could have been an asset in our national defense but instead had been turned into some hollowed trophy of Conservative dogma.

That Ronny fed off of Margaret’s actions in Britain and vice versa in their one upmanship of ways to break humanity in favor of profit and all at the loss of a sense of national purpose or on a local level a sense of community that used to exist in the American town square.

That so much rhetoric these days serves as politics and PR drivel as the ship of state fades from greatness and into the deep forgotten abyss of history like all past empires etc.

Spilled milk? Or a sense of purpose to redirect our personal goals if we are a basic Christian and our national goals if our combined sense of ancestry and common ethic can be re-galvanized into something like the idealized forum and town squares of our youth?

Is the eventual global town square going to be a great place to meet and hang out with your global neighbors or is it going to be one cold stone faced plaza that nobody cares to frequent?

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