The “For Sale By Owner” signs went back up on the Round House Cafe this week. I removed two of them last week, and returned them at the request of my friend Scott Carrino. The people I spoke with in town were saddened, even discouraged,  by the return of the signs and Scott has been telling worried people all week that the cafe is not closed now or soon going out of business.

I got many nice comments about my quiet little act of desperation – how often, really, does money lose in these conflicts?. And some criticism of  course, this is America.

“So, convinced of the “rightness” of your position, and without seeking to understand the pressures driving the other side,” wrote Kristy Arbuckle Lemmon on my Facebook Page, ” you took matters into your own hands. This is exactly the sort of immature impulse that drives people to pull down the election signs opposing candidates; they are so convinced of the rightness of their own agenda that they justify their petty behavior to themselves based on their “superior” values. The fact that you call this a personal decision while crowing about it on both your blog and Facebook proves the opposite. This was a VERY public fit of pique that you now want to present as an act of morality. You have inserted yourself into a complex and delicate situation where you had no standing. You should absolutely apologize—not necessarily to the landlord, but certainly to Scott and Lisa for substituting your judgement regarding how to they should handle their affairs for their own.”

Some others suggested I ought to be fined at least $1,000 or perhaps go to jail. I don’t think Dr. King’s heroic stand at the Pettus Bridge in Alabama is in danger of being overshadowed by my sign take-down, but I guess I am a controversial figure in my own right. Will my granddaughter hear of this sign thing after I am gone? I told my daughter in New York about it, she yawned and checked her e-mail.

I didn’t exactly apologize for taking the signs down, I asked Scott if I could take the signs down again, and he said no thanks, he really had no choice in the matter and the landlord wanted them put back up. Scott is a peacemaker.

So I told Scott my other idea: How about I put up a sign that says: “For Sale, Coming Soon – A Walmart near you?”

Perhaps the Wal-Mart could sell books and beads and hot dogs and pancakes for breakfast and a cafe and groceries and paintings for $12 and imitation antiques and pay people $8 an hour and sell underpants and apples shut down the few remaining farmstands and the rest of Main Street with one giant building, as it has done in thousands of small towns all across America.

We are in love with the cheapest prices at all costs in America and the cost has been pretty high to towns like mine.

In the last 60 years, one-third of the world’s farmable soil has been lost to erosion; we are in sight of the end of an era of cheap fossil fuels, we have polluted the entire earth with industrial poisons, and wars of commercial and cultural ferocity, raging on and on, have been accepted by our leaders and citizens as a kind of new norm.

After World War II, most of our cities and towns – especially in rural and heartland America – have become formless, impoverished, and ugly. Huge expanses of  fertile countryside have become monocultural deserts, toxic, depopulated, and ugly. The American the countryside has lost people, schools, community institutions, farms and factories in a great and awful migration that has driven 90 per cent of America to the coasts.

In our town of Cambridge, people are fighting hard to forestall and alter that reality here. In town, we are celebrating the re-construction of our only motel, closed for several years. And the impending arrival of a popular local brewing company. And the existence and survival and popularity of our community cafe, the Round House Cafe, after three years of grueling work.

Are things looking up? Or are we kidding ourselves. Again.

It is the cafe building that is now up for sale by the owner, as the ugly signs in the window suggest. The building has been on the market for nine years, and it is not clear to me or anyone I know what might be accomplished by triggering rumors that the cafe is going out of business, or of asking people to eat their egg sandwiches and drink their coffee starting at a “For Sale By Owner” sign in the window.

Is this really something that is “pique?”

If you live almost anywhere in rural America, you can see the symptoms of the general destructiveness of the corporate industrial economy, with its gazillion dollar agribusiness, its box stores, chains and franchises. We live in the Corporate Nation, we are all asked to bow to the golden calf.

In the face of this onslaught, there are now thousands of large and small organizations devoted to saving or protecting things of value that are endangered, and in so many places, already gone: peace, kindness, civility, freedom, callings, childhood, health, wilderness areas, rivers, species of plants and animals, secure jobs, cultures, languages, farmland, family farms, farm families, families, the atmosphere, scenic roads, fine old buildings, pharmacies and small department stores, historic places, quietness, darkness, old trees.

And cafes and other community gathering places..

People here can be forgiven for seeing government as little more than a vast tool of destruction and indifference.I appreciate the Round House Cafe for many reasons, because they are one of these organizations devoting to saving things.

I think of them with great sympathy and love, because i know that if they fail to buy their building or find another, we will have witnessed another great mistake that can never be undone, something else to lose and mourn. These endangered jewels of life and memory, once gone, almost never come back.

It is not a good thing for a business to spend day after day reassuring loyal customers that they are not going out of business, that their building is not about to be sold out from under them. This may seem like a small or misguided issue to  Kristy Lommen, but it is a pretty big issue for me, worth taking a plastic hardware store sign down for at least a few hours to let people know that the flag is still there, that coffee will be served in the morning, that we will get to see and talk to one another for awhile longer, at least.

I think places like the Round House Cafe are places of great meaning, they give us hope that our woefully oblivious and arrogant species may somehow remember what is important and save us and our children and grandchildren. We can hardly save ourselves if we cannot recognize our own self-destructiveness and the awful corruption of money. Every day, we pluck and eat all of the apples in the garden, one day there will be none left.

Scott laughed at my idea for a Wal-Mart sign in the window, he looked at me strangely, and went off to make something in the kitchen.