The Caddo Herald
November 25, 1927
Community Suicide
One of the strangest phenomena witnessed in most small towns and small cities is the apparent eagerness with which many otherwise good citizens contribute to the tendency to commit community suicide.
These citizens will often show uncommon zeal in boosting any movement to obtain civic improvements, to promote the location of new industries, to secure better educational facilities, and so on. Yet many of these same proud boosters will deliberately engage in a practice which nullifies all their otherwise laudable efforts- and wonder why their town doesn’t go ahead.
We refer to the suicidal habit of buying away from home.
The enormous growth of the mail order habit in recent years is largely responsible for the failure of many communities to make the progress which their natural advantages would make possible. The money that ought to be kept at home for the expansion of local trade and industry is sent away to distant cities, never to return. This life-blood of prosperity is permitted to ebb away through the indifference or thoughtlessness of the very persons who set an example of local pride and loyalty.
A trifling saving here and there, usually more imaginary than real, is sufficient to cause the average citizen to forget his duty to his community and to himself, which if performed would mean more in the direction of local prosperity than all his other boosting efforts put together. Why boost in one direction, while committing community suicide in another?
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