🚀 go-pugleaf

Inappropriate newsgroups snipped...

Robert F Underhill (porres@world.std.com) wrote:
: Reinventing the village?  Better ban private automobiles from the vicinity.
: Americans would rather drive to the mall than walk across the street.

That's true, but it's also (IMO) a changeable habit.  I've lived in
neighborhoods in Boston, and now in Brooklyn, where a lot of people depended
largely on services that are available in the neighborhood.  I'll grant you,
it's rare -- how many places in the US do you know where it's commonplace
to see people walking around, dragging shopping carts behind them as they go
from the grocery store to the butcher to the dry cleaner to the hardware
store and back home again?  Maybe the only thing that makes the practice
endure is that it's a pain to drive and a pain to park.  

What are the characteristics of a "village", anyway?  Community? 
Self-sufficiency?  Small scale?  What, precisely, would get "reinvented" --
how do you embody those kinds of characteristics in an intentional community
without having their evil twins show up as well (insularity, homogeneity,
lack of resources)?  And how do you "reinvent a village" in the midst of
other communities?  

--
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Mary Malmros		Very Small Being		    malmros@shore.net

	We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to
	further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to 
	everyone else.  This Colorado cannot do.  A state cannot so deem 
	a class of persons a stranger to its laws.

				- US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
				  Writing for the majority
				  5/20/96