I’m here to tell you that The Front Porch Republic is not a community—and for the same reasons that no “gathering” of individuals at any “place” on the internet is a community. Community requires bodies in an actual place—a place where whole human beings can live and move and have their being. That is, a community requires a place where we can walk, eat, kiss, defecate, give one another the finger, and go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
I had to chuck at the following, which is quite profound:
Item the Fifth: Give the Finger. And let life be understood in all its beauty and ugliness. The walking, eating, kissing (etc.), and fertilizing will necessarily involve some wrath and acrimony—that is, some flipping of the bird. Acrimony tends to follow people wherever they go. But a community marked by real people in real places is poised to deal with real middle fingers. Unlike a supposed community—like, say, the FPR—an actual community is comprised of people who flip one another off in physical proximity. They do so with real fingers extended in front of faces that attach to real names. They cannot hide behind the anonymity afforded them by the computer screen. Even the young boys throwing snowballs at cars after midnight will be found out sooner or later. As a thrower of late-night snowballs I know this to be true. The longed-for anonymity is always pretty short-lived. What we throwers learn is that it’s hard to dole out abuse anonymously in a place that takes seriously the business of caring for itself.
In such a place I don’t mind getting flipped off. But let’s be clear: someone who flips you off from a moving car is a placeless coward. Let disputes take place face to face. There will be fewer of them if they are not conducted in abstraction.
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