Or perhaps more accurately--the decided lack of community, at least in many nations, certainly in the United States.

We are here defining community as that state between people where they act with love, good will, and sensitivity toward each other, based on their awareness of their connectedness with each other, indeed based on their cognizance of the connectedness of all people; even more specifically, based on their active awareness of, and belief in, the notion that all people are brothers and sisters in one human family.

Asserting a lack of community is the same as asserting the lack of love for one another. They are one and the same. A strong love ethic naturally and organically produces a strong sense of community, and hence, strong community.

This 21st century lack community is evident in a thousand different ways. For example:

• When Mrs. Smith complains to her neighbor Mrs. Jones about something Mrs. Jones is doing that is causing pain to Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. Jones continues that behavior or activity, or in the case of a vindictive neighbor Mrs. Jones, intensifies the behavior or activity, that clearly illustrates a lack of community.

• As has been recently socially observed and chronicled in the media:  when mother A is berated by mother B, because Mother A scolded or corrected, in good faith, and appropriately, Mother B's children, that indicates a lack of community.

• When two high school students enter their institution armed with automatic weapons, and proceed to kill everything that moves, and moreover, when the cause of said rampage is the cruel bullying toward the student-killers by stupid, uncaring, and aggressive fellow students, both the causal behavior and the resulting behavior indicate, clearly, cogently, and sadly, a lack of community.

Indeed, much pointed or unresolved social conflict, or injurious behavior visited upon someone by someone else, is an indication or symptom of our abject lack of community. Modern-day hyper-capitalist society is nothing if not rife with examples.

Moreover, and most relevant to the unique point-of-view of BOMA, many of our most commonplace social realities illustrate a lack of community, though we are not used to seeing them in those terms. We're not used to seeing them for what they really are, in their starkest and most fundamental human and social terms. For example:

• When a hungry person can't get food from someone (or a group of "someones," often called a "company") who has plenty of food--that illustrates a lack of community. And in such a case, the lack of community occurs in its worst form, because it is an institutionalized or systemic  lack of community.

  Worse yet, it is an institutionalized lack of community that we have been taught to accept. We never question its morality, or if we do, we really can't let ourselves entertain such notions for too long, lest we invite criticism from family or others for being "silly," "unrealistic," or--God forbid--"radical."

Indeed, the entire money-and-profit system works just like this; its very operation is predicated upon the routine practice of denying people what they need, unless profit can be made. This is the case, whether the needed resource is food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, transportation, education, entertainment, or anything else. The fact that the emperor has no clothes, meaning the fact that this is a blatantly immoral (and socially and economically illogical) way to treat our brothers and sisters in the human family, goes unnoticed--or at least unreported.

Whatever one says about it, it is certainly not a method of social intercourse that speaks of, and is rooted in, real community.