"Why? Craig H. Bennett Wants to Know

Editor's note: Although Craig's article published yesterday (unintentionally), we didn't want readers to miss it; and so, we're giving readers another opportunity.

by Craig H. Bennett*

I’ve got a birthday coming up in a few more days. I won’t mention which one. In fact, I’d prefer not to even think about which one. But something I’ve become aware of in the last few decades is that each successive birthday seems to prompt more and more retrospection: looking back over the time that I’ve been in this world, living in this country, and watching it all change gradually as I myself aged from one decade into the next. But, to an ever-increasing extent, I’ve been rather disturbed by what I’ve been seeing.

I was a kid during the 1950s and early ‘60s, growing up in a small local community not unlike this one (Boyertown). In conversation, I’ve often told people that it was like growing up in an Andy Hardy movie. My dad wasn’t a judge, like Mickey Rooney’s, and we didn’t amuse ourselves by perpetually putting together “shows” featuring the talents of our circle of friends. But beyond that, I don’t believe that the differences were all that great. For example, like pretty much everyone else in the neighborhood, we didn’t lock the doors of our house unless we were all going to be gone for the day. Someone could have walked in any time and made off with all the valuables the house contained, if he were willing to risk doing so in broad daylight. But, come to think of it, our house contained nothing that would ordinarily qualify as something valuable. Our family was a decidedly low-budget enterprise, and the pickin’s for any housebreakers would have been slim. But that’s no longer a practice in my old neighborhood or any other neighborhood that I’m aware of. Why?

Even when I was in high school, there was no local police officer assigned to the building. Such a thing would have been unheard of. But then there was practically no violence of any kind from one school year to the next, and the possibility of some nut with a gun entering the building and opening fire would never have occurred to anyone. Why?

Once my sister and I were in school all day, my mother took a job as the cashier in a little mom ‘n’ pop grocery store around the corner from our house. There was such a store in virtually every neighborhood all over town. From the entrance to the store where my mother worked you could easily see the one like it a little over a block away on the other side of New Street, a major artery into and out of town and a de facto boundary between sections of the community. There was another such store about the same convenient distance from my grandmother’s house, just over a ten-minute walk from our own. But then a major supermarket chain moved into town, and the little neighborhood groceries began to disappear. Then a bigger, more elaborate supermarket opened up just across the river in the neighboring town, and the one in our town disappeared. Now there is no “full service” grocery store in my home town, and you can’t shop for groceries unless you have access to an automobile to get to one of them (there are two now) on the other side of the river. Why?

I’ve always been especially uncomfortable in hot, humid weather, and I’ve been only too aware of the effects of climate change over the past several decades. Once, not may years ago, when my father was still alive, I asked him in the midst of a particularly oppressive day if summers were as sultry, soggy, and generally miserable as they had been lately. His answer? “We used to have trees.”

And he was right. The residential streets of my home town used to be lined with trees. They provided welcome shade to walkers, play areas for children that were protected from the direct, blazing heat of the summer sun, and actually kept our neighborhood noticeably cooler than other, more treeless areas of town. But trees don’t last forever; and when they become infected with some sort of blight, infested with destructive insects, or succumb to old age and begin to rot, they have to be taken down. Gradually, the fine old trees disappeared—all over town. And they were never replaced. Now the brutal summer sun beats down on the sidewalks and anyone waking along them, unhindered. Children play on front porches or in the house in the afternoon. And neighborhoods that used to be subtly cooled by the presence of trees are so no longer. Why?

At the bottom of my street, which was on a hill just like the rest of the town, was the “business district,” a modest assortment of stores, taverns, and a restaurant or two where you could buy almost anything you would be likely to need to support your home life. There was a hardware store, a furniture store, an appliance store, both a men’s and a women’s clothing store, a stationery store, and a “supply” store that was a sort of glorified five and ten-cent store, plus a few others. Before everyone in town came to own and drive automobiles, those stores managed to support their owners and a handful of employees each. But automobiles enabled town residents to travel easily and conveniently to nearby communities that were somewhat larger and offered a broader selection of stores and their wares. Then the appearance of the shopping center began to rapidly eviscerate such small-town business districts nationwide until they were little more than one row after another of vacant storefronts and short-lived, small-scale enterprises that contributed little to the local economy. And finally, the internet—which turned out to be the death knell of the shopping center. And why?

I’ll readily admit that a few of the things mentioned above are more convenient and offer more choices than what they replaced. But did they really have to replace anything? Why does every so-called improvement have to mean the disappearance of something that offered some worth-while attributes that their replacements do not? The old saw about how “you can’t stop progress” may have a lot of truth to it, but not everything that is promoted and sold to us as progress is worth the cost of whatever it relegates to the trash heap. Perhaps we should give some more thought to the probable consequences, the long-term effects, and the non-monetary cost of such things. We’ve lost a good bit of what made everyday life more pleasant, secure, convenient, and interesting; and we never missed it until it was gone—for good. That’s the result of short-term thinking. And short-term thinking by itself is rarely a good idea without comparing it with the results and conclusions of long-term thinking.

* Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and most bookstores

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