Where has all the community gone?

There's really very little community in modern society, at least in the culturally accepted places. (I can't speak to everyone's experiences; I don't claim to. What I say here is probably especially true for young adults, if it is for anyone.) Families fall apart in the wake of divorce as home life degrades; legitimate social discourse takes place primarily in conflationist, mobocracy blocs; few know or interact with their neighbors, and outside of that, anyone not known from previous, involuntarily established relationships (school, family, work, etc.), most people instinctively avoid anyway. "Public" spaces, where we interact with such strangers, are uncomfortable and alienating and not really public in the sense of community, or true socialism, or honestly feeling like the space is partly one's own.
As it is with public space, so it is with res publica in general--in the sense of one's responsibility, or of one's stake, or of any sort of relationship that an individual can have with a community of which he is a constituent part--true community is virtually nonexistent. The conceptual violence necessary to think of our current, unnatural socio-political structure as a form of community--something our politicians ask us to do all the time--is rather like suddenly discovering the rotting corpse of a close friend, whom one had until just now believed still alive. That's the day-to-day relationship we as individuals have with the concept of community; we easily allow ourselves to be convinced that community is alive and well. And yet it is a corpse; and its pale, decaying flesh has been stretched impossibly taut over the entire face of "our" nation-state. . . .

This is why it feels like doing something you're not supposed to when you get together with close friends in real community. It feels like conspiring, like intellectual mirroring, like holing up against the forces of chaos and time and an unjust world. Whenever you feel at all close to another person, it must constantly, at least subconsciously, remind you of how alone you are used to feeling.