Mary

I just answered a 6 page letter from an English relative that I have pen-paled with for the last 29 years.

Mary is an 83 year old widow, a great-grandmother, and a retired medical secretary.

She remembers that her father served in WWI, and was courting her mother. He had to learn to milk with a stool and a pail to fit in  with the in-laws family--sort of the price of admission into their inner circle. She recalled how warm and cozy rural, village life was there and then in the 40s.

They had no central heating, no TV, no refrigerators but they were content and happy, with full, warm and emotionally rich lives. She laments how much the world has changed--even village life--from the olden days.

This got me to thinking.

I envision an ideal society in which people live and run government locally as anarchist-individuating supercitizens.

With that local connection and touch, the emotional warmth, rootedness, sense of security and belonging enjoyed by an English girl 70 years ago, could be repeated and replicated everywhere. People could gain from the comforting closeness and familiarity of people they know well, the local touch, without the stultifying constriction that comes with rural groupism.

Local, warm structure and connectedness can be had without the rigidity and staleness of most rural group setups.