Sonny Thurmond and I have been friends since before we started school together at Greensboro (GA) Elementary, though there is photographic evidence that he excluded me from his second birthday party, a slight I have since forgiven. Sonny has always been an avid sports fan and an athlete who made up in determination and desire for whatever he lacked in natural ability—the sports personification of the biblical parable of the talents. When we had lunch the other day, he produced shot charts from our championship basketball season when we were juniors in high school. It is interesting to see a game reduced to how many shots each player took, where they shot from and how many they made. Our star, Roger Glass, took the most. My playing strategy acknowledged that Roger was a much better shot than I was and was closer to the basket, so a pass to him was better than a shot by me. It just doesn’t show up in the charts.

One thing striking about that season record is the high schools we played against. They included Union Point, Tignall, Crawfordville, Social Circle and Loganville (whom we beat in the regional finals right after they stomped us in the sub-region) Those were high schools too small even to field a football team, so they just concentrated on basketball and always had good teams. They also had a presence in their towns, a focal point for community activities and civic pride. And the students who attended them went to school surrounded by a network of people who knew them and knew their families. What happened at school stayed in the village.

All that was already changing, even as were rebounding against Loganville to win the region and going on to Macon to get trounced in the state tournament. Educational philosophy had embraced the concept that bigger is better, and all over Georgia school consolidation was the new ticket to improved facilities that could offer more courses in enhanced surroundings to more students than the little podunk high schools. So, students started riding the bus great distances, out of their known communities to the new frontier of the consolidated school in the county seat, where few people knew their mamma and daddy. They no longer played ball before the hometown crowd, and the hometown lost its center and began the decline from town back toward crossroads. By the time integration finally got to Georgia high schools, it happened away from the local communities, among strangers.

So, the sports teams, like the facilities, grew bigger and better, though fewer students got to play, and the spectators had to drive greater distances to watch kids they didn’t know. What is the value of community, of interacting with local people in our daily rounds—local people who have a stake in what they’re doing, who are working in a local business, perhaps owning it, rather than punching a time card for the local iteration of yet another multinational corporation whose managers never knew our mammas and daddies?

What would it do to Athens-Clarke County if a new wave of school consolidation closed our high schools and bused our students to Gwinnett County? What is the loss of our local businesses doing to our community? As more and more chain food vendors flood our economy, local restaurants go under. The same with movie theaters, drug stores, grocery stores, hardware stores, clothing and shoe stores, The chains don’t advertise in locally owned newspapers, so eventually, Flagpole could go under, too. 

Am I crazy? Is it just my imagination that the pizza is better at Ted’s and Transmet and the movies at Ciné? Is it old-fashioned to appreciate the fact that you can make a suggestion directly to the owner at Big City Bread or Crazy Ray’s Car Wash? I’m not saying buy local because you ought to; I’m saying that local is so much better it’s a slam-dunk.