Like Jerrod Markle (March 10 letters to the editor), I often feel fortunate because I have had many good neighbors.

I have been blessed to know men and women like Frank Ross, Gilbert and Lynn Smith, Harold and JoAnna Burke, and Ken and Gordon Waldheim — men and women of great personal integrity and neighborliness. Each of these people has touched my life in his or her own special and profound way.

I like the definition of community that emphasizes fellowship, the sense that all of us are in this together, coming together with unity of purpose. This is where I think Butler County falls short.

We are great at celebrating and mourning, reveling and rallying. We fall short in the commonplace, to our own detriment.

Too often we sacrifice our neighbors in a false sense of economy. We place them in competition with outside forces that are good neighbors until it no longer is profitable.

Once upon a time, Butler County had many thriving locally owned businesses and farms. Many of these places are gone, replaced by farms and businesses with roots elsewhere.

Large farms and large retail outlets from far away have drained this community of its real wealth. By promising to save us a few bucks on some purchases, they get our money, recirculate some of the money back in the form of wages for some employees (never as much as they take away), and destroy our communities, making us more dependent on other regions and more distant from each other.

We have saved a few bucks but lost something much dearer and harder to replace — a sense of neighborliness, a real standard of living, and security. We also lose the personal relationships with those business people who also are our neighbors.

I feel more invested when I am dealing with someone I know.

Frank Ross rescued us when a cement truck got bogged down in our driveway; he was on his way out of town on vacation. He then refused payment.

Harold Burke used to make house calls to our driveway to repair the many wrecks that we drove when we were young and money was tight. Then he sold us a reliable used car at a very fair price when he couldn't keep the others on the road.

First, Ken Waldheim, and later, Gordon, have put aside what they were doing to get us back cutting grass or making firewood.

Try getting that kind of service from people more concerned with the bottom line than community.