"More than a woman . . . you're more than a woman to me."
This hauntingly beautiful song by the BeeGees brought back warm memories tinted with the soft gold of Indian Summer. To most of you, it would probably symbolize the Disco Era. To me though, the first memory was farmsteading in the North Carolina Mountains . . . the wonderful friends and neighbors I had in the late 70s and early 1980s. You see, America was a different place then, a nation of good neighbors. Perhaps those in the burbs were not as close as we young farmsteaders, but neighborhood socializing was still the norm, not the exception, as today.
On most Friday nights back then, both the newcomers and oldtimers in our end of the Reems Creek Valley, would get together for a potluck dinner followed by volleyball, bluegrass music, folk dancing or disco. During the winter months, it was usually disco down in someone's basement. Our own private sock hops!
Things were changing around us, even as we milked our goats, chopped our firewood and tilled our gardens. I would get hints of the widespread use of cocaine and marihuana when attending parties in nearby Asheville, NC. Each summer, several hundred judges and lawyers from the Asheville Area would hold a massive pot party in pasture above our farm. A dense cloud of marihuana smoke would drift down Wolfpen Cove. On Monday morning afterward, the judges and prosecutors would send grass smokers to prison for several years.
Yes, it was the drugs that first isolated neighbor from neighbor, but it was the cults and extremist churches that really ended our neighborhood socializing. Word was passed around the Asheville Area, that if you joined particular "groups" (really they were new age, satanic or neonazi cults) you soon would have lots of money and would be immune from arrest for using drugs.
Simultaneously, the extremist churches were fostering an "us versus they" attitude in their memberships. Preachers and church leaders wanted blind loyalty so that when secret contributions demanded certain political services, the preachers could deliver. Any person NOT in that particular denomination or political party favored by the church's leaders, was labeled as diabolical. Eventually, so many families had stopped coming to the neighborhood parties due to loyalties to their church or socializing only with cult members or drug users, that we stopped getting together. The neighborhood began to pull apart.
The planned authoritarian police state, that was assumed to be inevitable in 2002, concentrated much of its energies on destruction of neighborhood loyalties. To work, the police state would have had to been supported by a majority of citizens, who put blind loyalty to the PARTY above that to their neighbors or human decency. Remember how Homeland Security encouraged neighbors to inform on neighbors?
You can not imagine the crimes committed against me by law enforcement officials of the State of Georgia and some local/federal agencies since I returned to Georgia 12 years ago. They were all geared toward isolating me from neighbors and friends . . . breaking up neighborhood loyalties. Whenever I rented or bought a house in a neighborhood of a new town to escape the corrupt police of the previous, some crooked cop would call up my neighbors with lies.
In Cobb County a crooked cop called my land lord and told him I was a drug dealer. In Cartersville, GA a city policman called all my neighbors and told them that I was a peeping tom and child molester, even though I was an appointed city official and was the architect for some of their most prominent historical landmarks. In Rome, GA the city police and some Georgia state police officials told everybody I was an DEA or FBI agent. In Jasper, where I live now, an FBI agent contacted the city's police chief the week I moved here and told him I was a dangerous, violent felon, who liked to constantly shoot off guns - a suspected serial killer. For unknown reasons these lying devils wearing badges (and is exactly what they are) were also obsessed with keeping me from having a girl friend or wife, then when they had chased all the women away, trying to frame me in to appearing to be a sexual deviate. When that didn't work, they repeatedly broke the law to crush my architecture practice.
So don't look upon the election of new faces in Washington to change overnight the inherent evil nature of American government today. There are several million worms in the barrel that need to be weeded out first. Will neighboring ever return to America? I don't know. It would be nice, but I am not optimistic of it coming back as soon as it was destroyed.
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| The Death of Neighboring ~ The Betrayal of America |
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CHARLIgurl1
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Feb 5 @ 12:58PM
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I really dont know if that will happen Etowah, altho Im sure everyone would think it to be a nice idea.
Times have changed and people have had to become a bit more private and selfish, not for nasty reasons, but purely for self family survival.
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funisnumber1
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Feb 5 @ 2:13PM
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Its going to be a grassroots movement I suspect. Look at every new home going up across America. Gone are the grand front porches and replacing them are privacy fences and back decks or patios. I remember sitting on my family's front porch as a kid and having conversation with every passer-by. I was born in and lived in a house adjacent to the very first Wal-Mart store in Arkansas. A lot of neighbors walked to the IGA and the Wal-Mart store and we enjoyed seeing everyone.
If you were a kid doing something troublesome, or even just being a kid, it was irksome to know that the neighbors walking by would surely tell your parents when they saw them on the Front Porch. A pain then to be sure, now I reminisce about it and realize what a blessing it was to have neighbors that knew you. And helped the village raise you.
I am a fan of the Front Porch. I suppose its part of my makeup now. I am grateful for knowing how it felt to be out front and aware and exposed to what was going on around me. When I bought my last two houses, you better believe the Front Porch was a huge requirement. That and how it would look with a Christmas Tree inside.
Although my response seems a bit like empty calories compared to what you've written about your experiences, I still hope for and long for Neighboring and hope sharing my own little homily about it makes some sense.
Peace and freedom from persecution, and Thanks for the post.
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hereshannon
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Feb 5 @ 2:19PM
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Thats exactly how it used to be in the neighborhood where I was raised. In the Summer months each night neighbors would get together at a different house and sit in the front yard and socialize over a few beers. There was a yearly street picnic, and a yearly clam bake in the Fall. My father was an electrician and would wire the garage of whoever was hosting the event that year, no charge of course. And everyone looked out for each other, they were a wonderful group of people. Now in the same neighborhood you would be lucky if someone said hello. Life has certainly changed.
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Etowah
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Feb 5 @ 3:48PM
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Would you believe that where the lawyers and judges pot party was held later was the location of many scenes in the movie, "The Last of the Mohicans?"
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