[fable]

It depends on where we live. I've actually lived in honest-to-goodness neighborhood communities where there *was* a sense of community, and we often went outside around sunset to gather and talk on one another's lawns. We partied together, we came to one another with our problems. When I locked myself out of our house, once, a neighbor called her cousin who came running with his locksmith set, and charged me nothing. But we sat around my neighbor's table eating fresh chocolate chip cookies.

But at the moment we live in a bedroom community in the South Jersey suburban sprawl near Philly, and the people around here think of two things, only: lawn development, and sports. We're not into the second, and our work on the first involves getting somebody to trim the lawn. They really, truly, dislike us, and have let us know that in the most obvious, sneering, New Jersey fashion. Sure, I have more friends up here on the Web than in my community--but it's not for lack of trying. It's a difference of interests and an unwillingness on the part of our current community to admit that non-threatening unconformity can be a acceptable thing.