If I had a bucket list it wouldn’t have any of the popular, trendy things on it. It would be a peculiar list of the strange and awkward experiences in life. Like moving into an isolated small town. For those who have never moved into a small town, you sure are missing out on one of life’s great experiences. 

I remember, when I lived in a small Wyoming town, going to the bank one Thursday after work to bring in my paycheck. A usual thing back in the days before the internet. A woman named Bernie was one of the tellers and the head of the town gossip circle. That particular weekend I was heading off to visit some friends, so I took more money out than usual. Bernie looked me square in the eye and asked, “This is not your usual transaction. Got something planned?” The irony is that everyone in town ridiculed her behind her back for being the town gossip, but only the well established would risk not answering her questions. I told her of my plans to go to Ft. Collins and visit some friends. She replied pleasantly, “Oh. That’s right. You graduated from Colorado State. That should be fun.”

There is no privacy in a small town, and strangers are kept at a distance until the rest of the town knows enough about them to trust them. For centuries, this is how small towns have functioned to minimize risk. It actually began long before humans. Think of a monkey screeching to alert the rest of the troop to an approaching stranger. A troop of monkeys and a community of humans are themselves a living organism with systems in place to monitor and expel possible pathogens. But, small towns are like single celled organisms. Cities became like multi-celled organisms, with each neighborhood like a small town.

As communities evolved to mitigate risks brought by strangers, religious practices improved on this need; honing and fine tuning the ability to build and maintain a protected community within an extended network.

Evolution follows the path of greatest risk.

Economic success has caused our communities to fall apart. Moreover, the internet and cell phones have made stranger danger into a virtual risk. No more can the town gossip circle keep track of anyone nosing around town. And now, a stranger from the other side of the planet is as much, or more of a threat than a stranger walking down the street in front of our house.

In my mind there are two paths that we can take forward. Either we will give up much of the individual technology we have to return to older ways of building small communities, or we will immerse ourselves with the technology and learn to build communities virtually that protect us from all strangers and the risks they represent. There is a third option where both of these are true. That we return to building real communities, where most of the people’s online activities become limited and monitored by a few community members who are responsible for protecting the community online. They would be like a town’s technology gossip circle. Or, and also, the town’s techno-clergy.