They came into the cafe all day, some with checks, some with envelopes, some with handshakes, a few with tears. They kept pressing money into Scott Carrino’s busy hands. Some did not have computers, had never been on Facebook.
As tens of thousands of farms and small local businesses of all kinds in rural communities all over America falter and perish under the effects of glutinous economic policies and cruel, political realities, as economists sit in their academic offices and politicians drink the corporate trough, my small and very special town of Cambridge, N.Y. is launching its own revolution, fighting to turn the tide and save its local cafe from the deprivations of new global economy.
And people from all over the country, and some parts of the world, have joined in this stirring cause. A new awakening, using the new technology. It isn’t just for discount sales and discounts, it seems. People can use it also, to help one another, to speak to one another.
“Good Luck with your fund raising!,” wrote Victoria Paschisch as she donated $30, “It’s for a good cause – small businesses supporting small communities and small communities supporting small businesses!” And community supporting community.
Good people from everywhere have contributed more than $18,000 towards a fund helping Scott and Lisa Carrino buy the building in which their wonderful cafe lives. Their landlord has put it up for sale. It could be sold to anyone.
. There is already one food franchise in our town, a Subway, and only one cafe. You can do the math for yourself, if you want to know what it will mean to our town if the cafe has no home. Scott and Lisa Carrino are asking for help so they can buy their building, be secure and keep their cafe going.
It is the soul of our community. Here, we meet one another, we see one another, we know one another.
One man, still recovering from a serious illness, walked into the cafe yesterday with a check for $1,000. A dairy farmer took $50 from the family’s “vacation” jar and gave it to me to give to Scott.
Contributions came from California, Canada, Utah, Louisiana, North Carolina, all over New England, Ohio, England, Australia, Michigan, North Dakota, Florida and Texas, among other places.
Scott called me and said one person had messaged him to wonder why he wasn’t asking a bank for money instead. “Why should I give?,” he asked.
Scott is a sweet man, and he thought it a fair question, he wanted to answer the man and asked for advice about what to say. I said he ought to tell him that it isn’t quite so simple. If the banks would have given him the money, he would have happily taken it. But the banks are the problem, not the solution. Banks have put people out of work, taken their homes, shut down their farms, ruined their businesses all over America, and gone unpunished.
The banks are not here to preserve our local community. They are the system that designs the new economy.
We need to help one another. And we have few other choices.
Every farmer or person who lives in rural America understands this story, knows the meaning of community, and the devastating consequences of its destruction.
No presidential candidate of either party has yet to mention the agony of the small farmer, or the ruined landscape of rural life. The people who live in the rural communities that built America have little money to give the Washington politicians compared to the billionaires and corporations who lobby them and contribute to their campaigns and control the lawmakers. If they are going to fight to preserve their communities, they will have to do it by themselves.
Rural communities are voiceless, caught in the wake of the new globalism. The people sending Scott and Lisa Carrino $5 and $10 to their gofundme site know this, they don’t have to be told or persuaded. They only have to look out their windows, at their own Main Streets, at the empty farms and devastated towns.
Some people do have to be told.
In America, people are so busy hating everyone they disagree with that they have forgotten who to hate or how to do it in a civil and meaningful way.
As the farmers go under, as rural communities lose their pharmacies,their jobs, their hospitals and culture, as their children flee to cities for bad jobs working for people who care nothing for them, as rural America lives in the shadow of free markets, emerging economies, competitive labor markets, as towns and villages everywhere lose their economic supports and local institutions, the economists and politicians tell the reporters that there will always be some winners and losers, that is the price we pay for progress.
Things will sort themselves out over time. That, they say, justifies all of the suffering and loss, all the mistakes that can never be undone, all the ruined land and shattered communities. We know what profits are for, but what are people for?
The author and environmentalist and poet Wendell Berry writes that it seems in recent years that we have been reduced to a state of “absolute economics,” in which people and the land and all other creatures and things may be considered only as data, as economic “units,” in which a human being may be dealt with only as a “covetous machine.” Our national religion has become profit, gained by any means, at all costs.
Human beings exist only to buttress the bottom line, their lives and dreams do not matter.
All of this destructive work of mindless genius, greed and power is perhaps unfortunate, but it cannot be helped, they tell us. Progress is progress. And profits are sacred, nothing takes precedence over them.
But Scott and Lisa Carrino, who have devoted their lives to the idea of community, are here to show us that it can be helped. It just isn’t easy, and it is never cheap.
The defenders of the new economic order have no comfort or wisdom for the new losers, the rural people the politicians and CEO’s and economists have no idea what to do with. The new losers simply accumulate, especially in rural communities, earmarked to be human dumps, the inevitable waste and casualties in the greedy corporate nation. The idea seems to be that the displaced and the dispossessed should somehow get retrained, or move, or reinvent themselves after they are tossed into the streets, often at the age of 50 and up.
And then everybody says tsk, tsk, and wonders why people are so angry.
So our idea here is that the Round House Cafe should not be displaced, or that Lisa and Scott ought not to be retrained or wait in the growing and disheartening queue for meaningful and sustainable work. Our community should not be discarded and asked to quietly to off into the good night.
I would tell the man who messaged Scott to either contribute to the campaign or do something else with his money, that is his right. Meanwhile, in our town we are grateful for the many people who understand and are trying to start telling a new and different story for community. If we can do it here, you can do it there. If you are so inclined, please help this good effort by going here.
This revolution is underway.