A few weeks ago I attended a Benicia Old Town Theater meeting at the home of Robert and Mary Ann Winters, founders of the group that began staging successful plays and musicals in Benicia 36 years ago. While the meeting covered general business issues, concern for the future was palpable: membership was declining; there were too few actors and volunteers willing to commit evenings and weekends to rehearsals and set construction; and attendance was down.

Some thought that competition might explain the decline. BOTTG was started as a dinner theater when there were few restaurants in Benicia. There are now many fine restaurants, and community theaters throughout the area draw on the same audience BOTTG attracts.

Many changes were proposed. Some in the group favored the production of smaller plays that were less frequently performed, while others contended that musicals were winners and should not be abandoned. Certainly, all agreed, they wanted to have fun and produce outstanding live theater.

But the problems BOTTG faces are not unique.

Robert Putnam’s recent book, "Bowling Alone", voluminously documents across-the-board declines in community participation.

For example, after peaking in 1959, PTA membership has declined by more than 50%, and membership in local government committees has declined by a similar amount in the last 25 years.

Since newspaper readership is highly correlated with community involvement, it is particularly shocking that more than 70% of those born before 1929 read a newspaper daily, while fewer than 30% of those born after 1960 do.

And though the number of bowlers has increased by 10% in the last 15 years, and these bowlers certainly do play with others, league membership has declined by more than 40%. If present trends continue, there will be no bowling leagues by 2010, hence the title to Putnam’s book.

In page after page of sobering statistics, Putnam chronicles the civic disengagement that has characterized the end of the 20^th century, the erosion of that which makes American democracy work. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the early 1800s, Americans looked out for each other and strove not to take advantage of one another by pursuing "self-interest rightly understood."

Putnam convincingly shows that two-career families, time, divorce and suburban sprawl are not major culprits, at most contributing 20% to community disengagement. He places the bulk of the blame, 55%, on electronic entertainment, especially TV, and generational differences that obtain because there is no war to win, no depression to overcome, no shared vision of what needs to be done.

Putnam admits to fuzzy percentages, but they feel right.

My grandparent’s and parent’s generation lived through the depression and fought in WWII. Civic obligations were a major part of their lives. But each successive generation has felt less obligated. While almost 60% of freshmen entering college in 1966 said they would keep up-to-date on politics and only 44% said that being well off was a major concern, by 1996 personal wealth was foremost on the minds of 72% of freshmen, while continued political awareness had dropped to a paltry 25%.

And we don’t need a Harvard sociologist, which Putnam is, to tell us that TV is a very peculiar entertainment, addictively consuming much of our leisure time by drawing us into a low-energy, passive state from which we emerge hours later, feeling much the worse for the experience. It absorbs our leisure time, yet we don’t really like it. Various studies have shown that "...television is about as enjoyable as housework and cooking, ranking well below all other leisure activities and indeed below work itself."

Yet, surprisingly, we let TV occupy time that we might otherwise devote to our families and to participation in community activities, like theater and town council, that have been shown to significantly increase our happiness and sense of community well being.

The devil’s not in the details: He’s in the tube.

While solutions would seem to be straight forward – educate our children to be civically engaged and turn off the TV – the former requires a resolve we may lack, witness the BOTTG problems, and the latter requires that we shun a drug-like addiction to something which peculiarly doesn’t even give us a sense of euphoria.

Certainly, as Putnam points out, organizations like BOTTG are exactly what we need to help us out of our community malaise. Without BOTTG and many other similar community organizations, we’re just people living in houses who go to work, shop, and watch others live TV-community lives.

Let’s hope that BOTTG will continue to have fun, stage plays, and play a significant role in drawing us out of our electronic, generational caves.