I am, I have discovered, a localist.

It is probable that I have always been a localist, though until I discovered Bill Kauffman, I never knew it.

A localist is a person who believes societies thrive through strong communities, and communities are things made of families, neighborhoods, towns and small, local governments. All decisions should devolve to the smallest unit first and only graduate to the next bigger unit as required.

The family — not the village — is responsible for raising a child. The neighborhood is the first and best defense against crime. The town folk band together for socialization and commerce. Meanwhile the civic government fixes pot holes, collects the garbage and prevents any disorder that threatens the common good. Responsibilities only branch upward when issues become too complex to be solved by the more nuclear unit. Societies fail when individuals and groups look outside themselves for solutions.

Too often we’ve entrusted local decisions to state and federal bureaucracies far removed from a communities’ unique concerns, cultures, histories and environments. Rather than distrust such bureaucracies, we’ve called on them to build our factory schools (dehumanizing and demeaning our offspring) , redevelop our urban centers (often ripping the heart from once viable towns), and shipping off billions in tax dollars to entangle us in foreign alliances that lead to unnecessary animosities.

Gradually, we have let ourselves become beset by apparatuses of power that know few checks nor balances; unhindered, they march on in their ability to impose, dictate and declare — all hail the state! Never mind that our most astute founders considered the first Sovereign to be the individual and attempted to leave us a legacy of defused power that entrusted communities to rule themselves and only aide the larger government as emergency dictated.

You have Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt and Johnson to thank for changing all of that.

And theses thoughts begin with my innate localism, only to be revised by Kauffman.

I am, however, a localist without roots.

Born in San Diego, raised in East San Diego, eventually settling in eastern San Diego County, I cannot know a community as Kauffman knows his hometown of Batavia, New York.

While I can take pride in spending my formative years playing ball on the same streets and fields as Ted Williams, my family moved twice between my 7th grade year and my 9th grade year to neighborhoods foreign to me

The closest thing I have to a home town is El Cajon, Calif., where both my father and I went to high school (more by coincidence than community rootedness), and where he eventually owned a business and I eventually became a reporter for that town’s paper; but, now, in being nearly two decades removed from “the valley of green people” (as a classmate once described it because of all of the smog) my roots in El Cajon are quite withered.

I am a rootless localist

Last week, I was in Batavia for a street festival. As I stood next to a food vendor serving up fried dough, I watched two men greet each other with hail and hearty handshakes. The men were of similar complexion and age (I’d guess 52) and socio-economic sartorial display. Their cordialness and ease of greeting told me, without my asking, that surely they went to high school together, and probably their fathers went to school together, and just as likely, so did their grandfathers.

That is a rootedness that I will never know.

I can’t go back to El Cajon (who would even remember me?), and if I’m am fortunate enough to spend the next 20 years of my life in Western New York, I may never achieve the degree of rootedness I once had in El Cajon, let alone the deep fellowship those two Batavian men demonstrated on that Center Street corner.

Though I have dedicated my journalism career to enhancing and promoting community bonds — from co-publishing The Beacon in Ocean Beach, to three years at the Daily Californian in El Cajon, to launching East County Online with a conscious aim to provide a community forum on the Web — I’ve never found myself in one place long enough to build those bonds of a lifetime of knowledge. Sadly, even if I had, none of my friends remain in their original home towns.

But that does not diminish the value I see in community.

It is the bonds of neighborhoods and regional identity that make a secure democracy possible. Without neighborliness and community, tyranny is inevitable. When we rely more on the big government for our security rather than the little government for our parochial needs, we question less the naked reach for empire.

In the summer of 2006, when my career was uncertain and my rootlessness in a town I thought would give me the sense of strong community (Bakersfield, Calif.) I had always sought was painfully apparent, I was offered a job in Rochester.

Just a few months earlier, I would never have given the idea of moving to the cold northeast a second thought. But opportunities, and salvation, beckoned.

Here I was a California boy through-and-through. I owned some 200 books about California — it’s history, culture and environment. How could I leave the state that nurtured my first sense of regional identity?

But I had worked hard to achieve a certain level of respectability within my chosen field, and I wasn’t ready to throw it all away just to stay in California, so I accepted the job in Rochester and called upon my friend Matt Welch, also a California boy through-and-through, and offered to deposit my collection of California books at his Los Angeles Times office (Matt has since moved to Washington, D.C. to become editor of Reason Magainze, and he assures me the books are in safe keeping with another Times editor — for however long the Times remains in business).

My wife and I consoled ourselves with a bit of Google research that indicated the Rochester area was a region rich in culture, history and scenery. We would have fun, we said, exploring our new home state. We said, quite seriously, that we were moving from one of the greatest states in the union to one of the few other greatest states in the union.

We were right, and my discovery of Bill Kauffman has only helped us solidify that perspective.

Among Kauffman’s many books is his paean to localism: Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive.

Dispatches is about Kauffman’s Batavia, a rural hamlet some 20 or so miles from our house in Pittsford.

Kauffman celebrates Western New York with the same vigor as Huell Howser champion’s California, but with a more realistic assessment of the missteps of urban renewal, the nationalization of culture and the intrusion of misguided government programs to reform and sanitize.

Because of Kauffman I’ve discovered people like Henry W. Clune (author, journalist and aficionado of Rochester, whose book Main Street Beat we bought a year ago because it was a journalism book related to Rochester — and turns out to be a first edition, autographed copy, and Clune is among Kauffman’s localism heroes), the Society of the Genesee and the Crooked Lake Review, as well as insights into countless little nooks of local history and culture that you won’t find via a Google search.

The promise that Billie and I identified in New York to substitute for our sense of place in California has suddenly become real because of Bill Kauffman.

If Kauffman’s book were nothing more than a mere recital of urban renewal gone grossly wrong and the class and race divides that can separate a community, then I would not have spent just now more than 1,000 words burying the lede: Kauffman is a damn good writer. You should buy his books (any of his books) and read them.

There is much you learn about Batavia from Kauffman’s book that will make you think Batavia is some unique enclave populated by apple knockers and knock-kneed bat boys, marked by a history of suicidal pioneers (Joseph Ellicott) and drunken literary figures (John Gardner), not to mention seminal political movements (anti-Masonry), but if you have even a cursory understanding of your home town, you are likely to find much that is familiar — from the destruction of historic buildings in the name of urban renewal to the rise of Wal-Mart and the desolation of ma-and-pa shops along Main Street and the drifting apart of neighborhood bonds as families retreat to television sets in each room to be doped and satiated into a national stupor.

America is falling apart not because we lack leadership in Washington, but because of too much of the wrong kind of imposition and guidence from the Capitol, and too little of the right kind at home — in our families, on our blocks, in our neighborhoods and in our towns. And that is the message of Muckdog Gazette that Kauffman offers up as a morality tale for the 21st Century.

The question is, is it too late?

Again, buy the book: Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive