TIES THAT BIND - Part II

Ojai not immune to decline of community
By Bret Bradigan

Beau Luftenberg, 16, looked up from the well-ordered array of vials and bottles, with their taxonomic labels, wherein floated insects in various stages of development.
"Why do we fly fish?" the junior at Chaparral High School asked his instructor, who was busy setting up equipment and materials so that the class could simulate those insects with yarn, thread and feathers.

"Because it beats sitting with a rod all day. With fly fishing, you're moving. You see things. It's an activity, it takes creativity and judgment," said the volunteer instructor, Ray Johnson, 77, a retired school administrator.

Johnson can speak from experience. He has donated thousands of hours of time to both children and adults, teaching them how to build fly rods, tie flies, and cast them. He is a dues-paying member of several national organizations, and an organizer of at least one major local event.

In other words, he is a typical resident of Ojai and a typical man of his generation.

But that type of active, engaged citizen is endangered by a wide range of threats: competition for children's time, working parents, suburban sprawl, dwindling trust and mounting mortality, not to mention the twin demons of television and Wal-Mart.

In 1995, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, wrote an article for the Journal of Democracy, titled: "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital."

He looked at a broad range of indications that people weren't connecting with each other in the community, that they were, indeed, dropping out of the public sphere. Participation in public meetings dropped by a third from the 1960s to the 1990s. Voter turnout in presidential elections dropped from 64 percent in 1960 to fewer than 50 percent in 1996. Polls indicated that 77 percent of Americans felt the nation was worse off because of "less involvement in community affairs," and people who felt that their fellow citizens had become less civil in the past 10 years outnumbered those who felt that people had become more civil by 80 to 12 percent.

Putnam used bowling as his lead example. "Between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent ... The rise of solo bowling threatens the livelihood of bowling-lane proprietors because those who bowl as members of leagues consume three times as much beer and pizza as solo bowlers, and the money in bowling is in the beer and pizza, not the balls and shoes."

This is example resonates in Ojai, where Ojai's bowling alley closed a dozen years ago and its empty hulk stands as a stark reminder of this economic reality. Putnam warns of future consequences, however, of which that empty building is an omen.

"The broader social significance, however, lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo. Whether or not bowling beats balloting in the eyes of most Americans, bowling teams illustrate yet another vanishing form of social capital."

Pet Smith worked at Ojai Valley Bowl for years, and bowled in several leagues a week. She said that the casual conversations of the bowlers was a great way to keep in touch with friends and neighbors. "Most of the people who bowled up here, now bowl in Ventura. Or they don't bowl anymore period," she said. "That's all lost. There's a couple of people I keep in touch with, but that's it."

Despite so many similar accounts from across the country, Putnam's article struck a contrary chord. Other researchers and sociologists said that while attendance in club and fraternal organizations had declined by a third since the 1960s, membership in national organizations such as AARP had risen to 35 million. Involvement had merely shifted from community and fraternal groups such as the Lions Club (down 12 percent since 1983) and the Masonic Lodge (down 39 percent since 1959) to national interest groups like the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association, with their growth from a few dozen to millions within a few years.

Little League enrollment was declining, but surely that was because kids were joining American Youth Soccer Organization squads instead. The explosion of the Internet, with its unparalled ability to match up people by interest, was also not given its due, said critics.

And perhaps, urban sociologist Xavier de Souza Briggs warned, there is a dark side to social capital, citing the immense amount of cooperation and reciprocity required for Timothy McVeigh to carry out his act of domestic terrorism on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, or even the "sleeper cells" of Al Queda that brought down the World Trade Center towers and 3,000 lives.

Gangs and terrorists and even "good ole boy" networks and NIMBY groups exploit social capital for ends that are at odds with the common good.

The criticisms prompted Putnam to dip deeper. "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community," published in 2000, was his answer.

He discovered that while Little League enrollment had fallen, so had AYSO enrollment from its peak in the early 1990s. And while the stereotype of the small-town, narrow-minded backslapper as a racist zenophobe had taken root in people's imaginations through such works as Sinclair Lewis' "Babbitt" and "Main Street," the reality that Putnam discovered turned out to be far different.

The more connected people were through social and civic organizations, the more progressive were their viewpoints on race, gender and equality. Which made sense to Putnam's team of researchers, from the point of view that having a wider range of associates and acquaintances led to being exposed to different viewpoints.

And others have discovered that there is a steep personal cost to the nation's growing disengagement and isolation.
In the book "The Tipping Point," author Malcom Gladwell discusses a concept called " the "strength of weak ties" from a classic study by Mark Granovetter in 1974. When it comes to finding jobs, or life partners, it is these weak ties that matter most. In that study, 56 percent of the people surveyed had found their jobs through personal connections, as opposed to 18.8 percent who used standard practices such as checking the classifieds, or applying directly.

The interesting find, though, was that those who used a contact to find a job, only 16.7 percent saw their contact "regularly," 55.6 percent saw their contact "occasionally" and 28 percent saw their contact "rarely."

"People weren't getting their jobs through friends, they were getting them through acquaintances," Gladwell wrote. "Your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do ... How much then, would they know that you wouldn't know?

Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are."
Erstwhile Ojai Valley Bowl bowlers such as Pet Smith can attest to that, since they no longer enjoy the fruits of those informal networks.

The mechanisms of these networks of mutual reciprocity work to the benefit of the individual. But they also benefit the entire community. One illustration from Putnam's book is the volunteer fire department of Gold Beach, Oregon. To publicize their annual fund-raising effort, they had T-shirts printed up that said: "Come to our breakfast, we'll come to your fire."

People smile at that, Putnam wrote, "because they recognize the underlying norm of generalized reciprocity - the firefighters will come even if you don't." And yet, if the fire department is unable to raise enough funds to operate, it won't be around to respond to anyone's fire.

Next week: Ojai was the birthplace of the world's largest nongovernmental organization, but size is proving to be no substitute for the hard work it takes to make a viable community.

© 2003 The Ojai Valley News

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