Stop the Insanity

I've been thinking a lot about what a sense of place might mean while working on my piece for the fall journal. I've been thinking about feeling grounded, imagining what it means to have roots, to feel an enduring connection to a place and often, therefore, to its people.

So, I'm reading Serious Eats today, and see that there's a group out there – Save Our Starbucks – that's fighting on the free-speech friendly internet super highway to keep their nearest coffee mogul outpost open. The part that strikes me is that they're not angry about having to go farther for coffee or worrying that Starbucks is seriously in a business downturn. Nope. As Serious Eats summarizes for the people of SOS "a loss of Starbucks symbolizes a loss of community." And it's the way this word, community, is used that's curious to me.

One visitor on www.saveourstarbucks.com writes, "We must stop this insanity. People are losing their jobs. Starbucks has been a responsible addition to the communities they serve, their employees and customers. Loss of community is NOT the American way. Time to rally and save our Starbucks. No more java jive!"

The café and coffee house have long been associated with community. The first known coffee house, Kiva Han, dates to 1457 and was in Istanbul, Turkey. After the Turks invaded Vienna, and were defeated, they left behind their precious coffee beans. And, soon enough, Europe became dotted with places to drink the potent brew. Coffee houses, like bars but without the mind-numbing alcoholic drinks, were renowned for the conversation they inspired in their guests. They were places to congregate, to think, and to create dialogue. The Enlightenment owes something to coffee houses, as does the political counter-culture of 20th century America. They were places where things began. This is the history that the coffee houses of today inherit.

But the question is this: can a constantly expanding market that reproduces ad infitum the same, standardized and climate-controlled shop (that looks and feels the same no matter where you are) actually produce a place that fosters community? No doubt it can refuel a community that depends on coffee to keep it moving. But can it create community? Is it fertile ground for connection, for the creation of neighborhood, as in what happens when people share something unique because they live close together and their lives, informed by this place, begin to join?

Maybe I just have a different sense of what community means than these SOSers. Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News sheds some light on just what it might mean to them. He describes Starbucks as the litmus test of middle-class legitimacy: "For Starbucks to leave means that your part of town, in terms of social psychology, is downwardly mobile. That, I think, is what most rattles folks about losing their Starbucks, even if they rarely went there. It's a status thing." Which is just so ironic, because coffee houses of old were (ideally) socially-leveling places where men (okay, so nothing's perfect) of all classes could come together and discuss ideas freely.

Reading Wendell Barry over lunch at the counter of Diner, I am struck by this quote, which delineates the two forms of producers that Barry sees in this world: "The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health – his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's."

It seems that a sense of place entails an investment in the health of that place, that community. A dissenter on the SOS website writes, "Where were all of you when Starbucks was predatorily opening stores located to take business away from your locally owned coffee shop? Save your communities, not a massive corporate chain."
Leah

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