By Summer Saadah
EDITORIAL EDITOR

“I want to say just one word to you — just one word.
Are you listening?”
Plastics.”

That was the employment advice offered to Dustin Hoffman’s confused character in 1967’s “The Graduate.” He turned it down, by the way. He decided to grab his girl and scram.

He didn’t know where to go, but the idea was to go! He made sure to safely exit the sort of world that would offer up “plastics” as a solution to anyone’s cosmic confusion about what lay around the bend in the road.

Forty years later, utter that same word. Feel how flat your tongue feels spitting out the syllables? It’s the same word, but the meaning has shifted a bit. It is no longer “plastics” that are the future, but rather the future that has turned plastic.

And nowhere is this flat, cold decay more evident than in the heart of the modern community.

Not that communities even exist in most places. If they haven’t died, they certainly have gotten made over so much that they aren’t even recognizable. Groups of houses on a land developer’s tract is the nearest thing to a modern community.

And its heart? Where the locals gather to meet over coffee? To picnic? The community center? The school? The local library? No, that would be the mall. The mall is the heart, and the car is the aorta.

Take The Streets at Southpoint, for example, the pinnacle of plastic perfection. There are wrought iron streetlights that light the huge pathway lined with shops and restaurants — all of which play lady-in-waiting to the glass monstrosity that is the main mall.

There is a conglomerate bookstore (No need for libraries — authors don’t stop by to sign books at a library!). Inside of which is a ubiquitous, branded coffee shop. (Why relax? Use your caffeine to multitask). There are fiesta lights strung across the main path and music plays from behind the well-adorned flower arrangements lining the walkway.

It is clean. It is convenient. It is too neat.

Families throng to this mall on sunny Saturdays. They push the strollers while the kids play around the fountains that mark the main “street.” They throw coins in the water and babble about going inside to Build-a-Bear. Yes, there are even arts and crafts here.

And the real glory is that for a nominal price the children can be creative while you wile away the day in a building that won’t let you miss out on your daily dose of vitamin D thanks to its numerous skylights and huge windows.

There is something for everyone!

Yet, who IS everyone? They are nothing but a community of consumers held sway by the smarmy charm of all that glittering plastic: the neat flower pots, the $3 cups of coffee and the cooking lessons offered by the store that wants to sell you haute cuisine cookware for haute cuisine prices.

About 20 minutes away from this well-designed “modern” community center for the plastic at heart lies Carrboro’s Weaver Street Market. Its lawn — checkered with picnic tables with chipped paint, lounging students and earth-conscious families — is an homage to all that is disorganized. The noise of laughing children eclipses the sound of the traffic, and the guitar player and his buddies twang out the start of hits. There is noise and bustle and life being lived in every inch of sparse space of that lawn.

While the well-managed Streets of Southpoint stagnates with its order, this lawn — part-park, part-market and part-community center — breathes. There is something for everyone!

And who IS everyone? They live down the road. By the bike path. Around the bend in that creaky, old pink house. They are a community of consumers, as well, who are lured by the call of fresh grass, local products and the need to say “hi” to their neighbor who just went in.