Some thirty years after their passing, I visited the hometown of my grandparents. The Crowley, Louisiana, of my childhood was a bustling, thriving small town. It served as a hub of a rich agricultural landscape of rice farms. The Crowley I visited a decade ago was much as any other small town in America—it seemed to have lost its coherence, its reason for being.

A blighted and empty downtown, even as the rice warehouse district still appeared to be functioning. Housing stock that had disintegrated. A certain pride had vanished. The traffic arteries into town were littered with strip mall architecture. And with all such building, much was abandoned after ten years of use: what do you do with an old Hardees?

We sacrificed our communities and the social cohesion of small towns as farmers left the land. The small businesses supporting those families were shuttered or replaced by big box retail. We moved nationally from a citizen-producer society to a “folks”(as in quaint and harmless)-consumer culture.

The Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, Earl Butz, had a message to farmers, “Get Big or Get Out.” And American farmers got out. Our modern policies on agriculture, to be fair to Mr. Butz, have always been thus inclined. As a nation we see value in the production of agricultural goods and pride ourselves in the amount produced. But we’ve never valued the farmer and the small town around the farm.

As a consequence of bad policies and decisions, these communities have been eviscerated of any real living core. The principal businesses of the small towns in our East Tennessee valley are check cashing, title loans, pawn shops, tattoo parlors and antique shops—businesses that either suck away the individual’s ability to squeak from one check to the next, help him hide from himself, or sell him a phantom of a past he will never reach.

We have approximately 750,000 farmers in the U.S. Compare that to more than 14 million in a comparable-size area being farmed in Europe. Is it just a coincidence that Europe’s village culture remains more intact than ours? Whatever the reasons, it is clear that various factors have conspired to preserve that European tradition, and to the benefit of a livable landscape and community.

When you can’t or won’t get big and you get out … where do you go? Where do we go?

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Reading this weekend: Paper: an elegy by Ian Sansom