community breakdown Quotes

So many people representing different sections of our community are taken down one way or another. The system was designed to break us down. You think it isn’t true? The three-strike rule is to break down a black man.

Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.

Everyone has this sense of togetherness right now. For example, one guy on the subway today, he wanted to share my pants.

America is so terribly grim in spite of all that material prosperity.... Compassion and the old neighborliness have gone, people stand by and do nothing when friends and neighbors are attacked, libeled and ruined. The worst thing is what is done to the children. They are being taught to admire and emulate stool pigeons, to betray and to hate, and all in a sickening atmosphere of religious hypocrisy.

One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.

Most poverty and suffering - whether in a country, a family or a person - flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it

That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.

What has changed is that people have stopped working together.

If you have conflicts, everything breaks down in society. Kids can't go to school. Basic health can't be looked after. Every aspect of society falls apart.

American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.

Society becomes very destructive.

When the Internet really first started to hit, people felt this would be the death blow: after suburbs and long commutes and television and the death of the family dinner, this would be the last straw that would totally break society.

Don’t forget how quickly people who have lived next to each other for generations have turned on each other.

Without a vision people and the church become self-centered. People start finding fault with one another and the church self-destructs.

The consumer culture in general has washed over our civilization. For the last 50 years, if you've had a credit card and some access to money, you don't really need neighbors around you. And as a result, they dwindled. The average American has half as many close friends as they did in 1950. Three quarters of Americans don't know their next-door neighbor. They may know their name, but they have no real relationship with them. That's an utterly new place for human beings to find themselves in - I mean, we're a socially evolved primate.

Perhaps the greatest and least visible form of impoverishment caused by the Corporate State is the destruction of community.

There is no such thing as society.

The intrinsic social structure, the family structure and so forth, is certainly in a very bad state. And I think that this is showing up in productivity. I think part of the reason, and I can't prove this, we're seeing a decline in some places is the breakup of the family, which is partly the result of an extreme form of individualism.

In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that.

Record stores keep the human social contact alive it brings people together. Without the independent record stores the community breaks down with everyone sitting in front of their computers

As far as I can tell, 1968 is a year about change, about revolution, about violence, about people turning inwards as community breaks down.

Without hope, the very fabric of our society will fall apart.

When the family is destroyed, society eventually disintegrates.

Any Church community, if it thinks it can comfortably go its own way without creative concern and effective cooperation in helping the poor to live with dignity and reaching out to everyone, will also risk breaking down.