The news that the Boy Scouts of America may go bankrupt should have shocked, but it didn’t. The Scouts are sinking under the weight of payouts to people who as children were abused by Scout leaders.

Should the Boy Scouts go under, we would lose yet another social institution that has served down the years to unite us in some ways, despite their current woes. Those social institutions were a big part of what made up community, the glue that held us all together.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote that the thinning of this glue created a condition he called anomie. It is a “condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals,” wrote the authors of a sociology text (John Macionis and Linda Gerber). This . . . causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, another source wrote.

When I look around rural Maine, I see lots of evidence of anomie. In fact it is tempting to trace the rise of such anti-institution politicians as Gov. (three days left!) Paul LePage and President (751 days left) Donald Trump to the growing anomie in rural America.

Look at these social institutions that have diminished or even disappeared around here.

Start with the Boy Scouts. I signed on as a Cub Scout, stayed until age 15, worked up to Heart level, a merit badge shy of Life Scout. In Troop 3 of Columbia, Missouri, we set up a living nativity scene on a church lawn at Christmas, raised money for good works, among other activities. Like all Scouts, we went camping, learned outdoor ways, learned what you might call the code of Scouting. The Scout Law, the Scout Oath.

But Boy Scouts have been receding for decades in the national conscience. Joining was not even an issue for our sons, who were of age in the ’80s. One was asked about Cub Scouts, which begins at age 8, but wasn’t interested. When I Google Boy Scouts in Maine I find a Cub Scout pack and a Boy Scout troop in Farmington, and a pack and a troop in Wilton. In years past, there was a pack and a troop in New Sharon. No longer.

Churches taught moral lessons, and whether the lessons took may not be so important as that everyone was taught the same points. But churches are dying or adjusting to attendance that gets lost in old church houses built to hold half the town. In our town of 1,400, perhaps 40 people attend the three worships on Sunday morning. Total.

Time was that the schools taught pretty much the same curriculum to everyone. In my high school, the history path was world history, then two years of American. Math was algebra I, geometry, algebra II, trigonometry. And so on. Almost everyone took all of those courses. Today, kids have many more choices, so it is possible that a class of 300 graduating in Maine won’t have two kids who took all the same courses. The variety is wonderful, but it also means that kids graduate with no shared body of knowledge.

School houses were community centers as well, with towns turning out for ball games, concerts, meetings. In our school district today, only three of the 10 towns even have school houses. In my time here, six of the 10 had schools.

In some cases, government action intended for one purpose has the side effect of thinning the glue of community.

The DEP has closed many town dumps. It closed ours in 1986, forcing the town to pay to haul trash to Norridgewock for disposal. Wags called our dump the “New Sharon flea market.” Wives, some said, didn’t let their husbands go to the dump because the men brought home more stuff than they had hauled away.

The dump was a community where you ran into neighbors, where you caught up on local events. And perhaps picked up an old couch that was usable but didn’t fit someone’s new color scheme. That’s community. Exchanging news, gossip and goods.

These are all examples of community yielding to social isolation. But here may be an example of isolation reinforcing a community.

My late wife and I attended a basketball game at Rangeley High School. As we went in, people walked past us carrying casseroles or salads. In a nearby room, we saw tables freighted with those dishes. The boosters were selling lunch to raise money. We bought.

As the girls warmed up for the game, someone passed out posters bearing the number 1,000. Turned out a Rangeley player, Christine Romero, was likely to score her 1,000th point that day. When she did, we were to wave our posters. She did, and we did.

(An aside. Samantha DePoy, a Sun Journal reporter, profiled Romero when the high-schooler competed for Miss Teenage Maine. An athlete entering a pageant then was rare. Since then, two UMaine athletes and a USM athlete have represented Maine in the Miss USA contest. Katie Whittier of New Gloucester, was fourth runner-up.)

The girls lined up for the National Anthem. Sarah Schrader, a Rangeley player, pulled a violin from under the bench and played the “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Put back the fiddle and joined her teammates for the tipoff. Rangeley won the game easily.

Rangeley has about 65 high-school students. More than a dozen — that’s about 40 percent of the girls in the school — were on the girls team. Others played in the pep band or led cheers. We figured half the students in Rangeley High were involved that day.

You gonna see that in Portland? Bangor? Lewiston? Farmington? Not likely. At least in Rangeley, it seems, community is still in town.

Bob Neal misses the days when the town was a community, but he doesn’t know how to go back there. How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm . . .?