In our town, the Round House Cafe and it’s campaign to purchase its own building has touched a deep chord, Scott and Lisa Carrino have already raised more than $42,000 from their gofundme project and some thousands more from people in our town and well beyond.

People get it. Our community is theirs, if we can save ours, they can save theirs. A new awakening, I think, a realization that we are close to losing precious things in our towns and villages and cities, especially in rural America, things that once lost, can never be replaced.

The campaign is a great success, but the Carrinos do not yet have enough to get a mortgage on the old bank that is now their much loved cafe. They are moving much closer, but they need more help.

And their campaign has implications for everyone who cares about community and lives in rural America.

As local community decays along with local economy, writes the author Wendell Berry, a vast amnesia has settled over the rural countryside. As the farmers departs with the soil and the rain, so local knowledge and local memory – and local community – move away to the cities or are forgotten under the influence of corporatized sales chatter and box stores and franchises, business, the decline of the family farm, changes in entertainment and education.

The loss of local knowledge and local memory, the loss of local culture, is accepted or written off as one of the cheaper prices to pay for progress, for once unimaginable profits poring upwards to a handful of people and corporations in a tsunami of greed.

If you live in rural America, where journalists no longer go and politicians no longer bother to campaign – there is just not enough money here – you would not be in the least surprised by what’s happening in our isolated and disconnected political system.

The politicians and economists have forgotten what people are for, and the people are reminding them that they will not be forgotten or discarded, all across the political spectrum. The students yoked with their staggering debt and troubled future and the  laid off factory workers with no hope of a future at all have finally connected with one another to remind us of the importance of our lost communities and way of life.

They are saying what Willie Loman said a half-century ago. Attention must be paid. People are paying attention to the Round House Cafe. The people in my town are determined to save it, if we lose it,  our gathering place will be a Subway franchise on a busy road.

The abandonment of rural life has been a calamity of historic proportions. Most Americans are now living farm from our cultural and economic sources of faith and community. In our greed and thoughtlessness, we have destroyed the foundations of local life. Everywhere in rural life, the long succession of generations has been broken, we have lost our stories and our sense of belonging, our sense of community, the local institutions that were the backbone of our lives.

This is what the Round House Cafe campaign is about, an awakening, a heroic stand for community in the face of runaway corporate greed, think tank economic theory,  and political betrayal. People come into the cafe every day with cash in their hands and envelopes for Scott and Lisa.

There is no doubt in my mind that they will soon have enough money either to buy the cafe building or find a suitable place nearby. Their landlord has put the building up for sale, for those of you reading about this for the first time. They want to buy their building, and they will have to buy it or move.

In just a few short years, the cafe has become the soul of the town, a reversal of the long exodus of local life from the countryside. If you have helped, thanks, If you wish to help now, thanks. If you can’t or choose not to, thanks for considering it. (You can also send a check to the Round House Cafe and Bakery, 1 Washington Street, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.)