Reflecting on a meeting with the Sixth Judicial District Attorney in La Plata County, Colorado, I googled "why is community so important in a small town?" and stumbled upon Robert Wuthnow's online book, specifically the chapter, Community Spirit: Small-Town Identities That Bind https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/23994/chapter-abstract/185358287?redirectedFrom=fulltext
The abstract is: This chapter examines what residents understand as the most important sources of community spirit in their towns. It is widely believed that small towns do encourage community participation, but the meanings of community spirit or its sources in towns' activities, such as homecoming festivals and events related to athletics, have rarely been studied. The chapter considers how narratives about the goodness and decency of a community are formulated, and how they reflect special occasions in which personal or collective tragedy is overcome. A key part of community spirit is the perception that acquaintances in town are in fact good neighbors. How neighborliness is demonstrated even through small greetings and sidewalk behavior is the secret behind these perceptions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the stories that townspeople tell to combat negative stereotypes imposed on them by city people along with tales that emphasize the relative freedom, openness, and closeness to nature that small-town life provides.
The byline is this, "Residents of small towns feel that they can rely on one another for help in the event of a tragedy or some other adverse situation." Isn't that just hitting the nail on the head for restorative justice? La Plata County, and Durango, CO is an intersection of wealthy-ish pro cyclists and athletes, veterans, working class people, and legacy indigenous people. These subcultures often run in completely parallel paths with very little integration and cross-over. How can we change that so our community becomes stronger together and we RESTORE those community members that might otherwise be left behind?
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