Utne Reader Probes the All-American Quest to Buy Roots

Here’s a multiple choice question the U.S. Census people should have asked but didn’t:

If you were to click your heels three times and repeat, “There’s no place like home,” you’d go spinning off and land:

A. Where you were born.

B. Where you live now.

C. Where you went to college.

D. Wherever it is the Simpsons, the Partridge family and that “Wonder Years” family live.

If you can’t decide, you’re probably right at home here in America, where--as discussed in a series of articles in the May-June Utne Reader--a sense of rootlessness is causing many baby boomers to rethink their place in the universe.

They are, Brad Edmondson writes in the lead piece, “discovering that something important is missing from their lives. They need to be part of a community, and they’re trying to purchase the feeling.”

So it is that peripatetic Y-people wander from Seattle to Minneapolis to Pittsburgh, following the demographers’ lists of the most habitable cities of the moment.

But community can only be bought with patience, tolerance, generosity and a willingness to stay put, Edmondson says. So the cocooning generation is left to cry in its cappuccino as the Mayflower company packs up the compact disc player once again.

An immigrant, pioneer culture, America has always honored a willingness to pull up stakes and move on to better things. Why the appeal of transience is apparently withering is a complex matter. So is what can be done about it.

Essayist Wendall Berry lays the blame for the deterioration of communities that folks want to call home on “a powerful class of itinerant professional vandals.” These would be the careerist planners, developers and business consultants who move from landscape to landscape imposing their latest brilliant idea upon places where they have no intention of staying long enough to experience the consequences.

David Morris, director of the Washington-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, sees the problem of rootlessness arising, at least in part, from the evaporation of informal public meeting places, such as lunch counters, branch libraries and taverns.

To support this, he cites psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s observation that there is a direct correlation between the decline in the number of bartenders in a neighborhood and the increase in psychiatrists.

But getting rooted and finding a community to call home isn’t as simple as sitting next to Frazier at Cheers.

“Communities, by definition, happen in public,” Edmondson writes. “Their beauty and importance comes from small, seemingly insignificant things like conversations with strangers, neighborhood groups that lobby local politicians, and flower boxes hanging from windows.”

Finding your roots and a place to call home takes time and means mingling not only with the neighbors you like, but with “bores, boors, and people who smell bad,” Edmondson writes.

But he thinks the rewards are worth the effort.

“For one thing, you get to be a part of a lot of world-class pancake breakfasts.”

REQUIRED READING

* The last time magazine readers met “Dr. Death,” he had a minor role in a New Yorker article on the documentary film “The Thin Blue Line.” The doctor, Texas psychiatrist James Grigson, had “guaranteed” a jury that Randall Dale Adams, just convicted of murder, would kill again.

“Thin Blue Line” persuaded the Texas justice system that Adams was innocent. Now, despite repeated admonitions from his peers and the American Psychiatric Assn., “the hanging psychiatrist” continues to ride the Texas range, persuading juries to give convicted murderers the death penalty. Ron Rosenbaum rode along for a few days, and his story in the May Vanity Fair is the sort of gripping, disturbing story that is increasingly rare in magazines.

* Essence magazine is 20 years old this month and its anniversary issue is an infectiously inspiring “clap your hands” tribute to dozens of black women role models--”sheros,” as the magazine calls them. They’re people like “Sweet” Alice Harris of Parents of Watts, Planned Parenthood’s Faye Wattleton, diva Leontyne Price and rocker Tracy Chapman.

* Four hundred kids die in bicycle collisions with cars each year; 16,000 are wheeled into emergency rooms, most with traumatic head injuries. The May Bicycling offers good tips on how to get young cyclists to wear helmets.

OBITUARIES

The good news is, 7 Days, the hip and spunky New York weekly, won a well deserved National Magazine Award last week and was roundly praised for its editorial excellence.

The bad news is, the magazine went belly up just before the prestigious awards ceremony.