Yesterday the Beloved and I spent the day at Old Sturbridge Village. It was a beautiful day, perfect temperatures, light breezes, the sun playing hide and seek behind the clouds.
Old Sturbridge Village (OSV on those oval bumper stickers) is a recreation of a Massachusetts farming village in the 1830's - what would seem to us to be halcyon days, 50 years after the War of Independence, a full generation before the Civil War. Even though you can hear a low hum from the Mass Pike and an occasional overhead jet, you do get a sense of a different way of life living on dirt roads with homes separated by stands of trees, property marked by stone or post fences.
Some people's lives were really just a step up from camping...you had to be middle class to have one of those new "stoves" and even wealthy people still did the bulk of their cooking in the fireplace. Many homes were essentially one room, and nobody had indoor plumbing. Having a wash basin and ewer in your bedroom was considered a luxury.
My own town of Lowell, the first planned mill town in the US, would have been about 10 years old at the time...girls from Sturbridge would have gone there to work and probably would have been amazed at people living so close together. But what really struck me about Sturbridge was the small world in which it existed.
Without cellphones or satellites or telegraph, at a time when most newspapers only published weekly (because the process was so labor intensive, a printer couldn't make enough money to live on even at that schedule) there would have been little news of the state or nation, let alone what was going on in the world. Packets would go out to missionaries in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and letters would come back occasionally, farmers might make the trip into Boston once or twice a year, but your world would pretty much be contained within the distance you or your horse could walk in a day.
We talk about the world getting smaller with the advent of high speed information and travel. I once flew from Chicago to Tokyo (via Dallas) in less than 24 hours and the next day I was in Manila. How long would that trip have taken a woman from Sturbridge? But in the same way that we get information from around the world almost instantly, our world has not gotten smaller, it has gotten larger, because there is so much more to comprehend, so many more people about whom we worry, of whom we are afraid. There are so many more disasters that tug at our hearts, so many more places we want to see and know. While the world has become more accessible it has also asked far more of us than we could ever have imagined, and in truth, I think that imagination has been one of the first casualties of the deluge of "fact."
How do we deal with all the appeals to our better natures without being destroyed by our inability to meet every need? How do we use our resources effectively and justly? I have always marveled at the courage of those who do triage in emergency situations -- to make decisions about where the limited help will do the most good is heart rending. Yet spending all our money on band-aids for everyone does little good in the end.
What Sturbridge reminds me is that there is power in community -- people helping those with whom they live so that everyone lives better. And what the modern world reminds me is that communities can help communities -- the principles do expand to larger scale. So instead of each of us fretting about how little we can do as individuals (or perhaps simply isolating ourselves from others because of our sense of impotence) we may need to rethink the creation of small communities -- neighborhoods, faith communities, service communities that are not merely organizations but organisms of commitment to each other and to the big/small world which we share.
No comments:
Post a Comment