Rebuild Community

 

Only January 10th and as one rediditor put it, it feels like 10 years! There are so many things happening all at once; the murder of Renee Good, the kidnapping of a head of state, Maduro, more ranting about Greenland and mass protests in Iran to name a few. Each one of these could easily be a blog post or hell, even a series! It's easy to write about the ongoing outrages, especially when there is a new one every damn day it seems. Let's step back from that. I'd like to share a way to help solve many of our ongoing problems. The idea is simple, rebuild local community.

Our problems are not left versus right, they are top versus bottom. Rebuilding local community cannot fix everything on its own. We need to ask ourselves if we can afford billionaires when people are going hungry and homeless. If the poor are just a cost of doing business as usual, isn't it time to improve or replace this system? Think of it this way, have you ever stopped and thought why do we need charities? We constantly remind ourselves that we are the richest nation on Earth, have the most powerful military in history and we think we are the envy of the world. Two out of three might be correct but we conveniently forget those without health care, the homeless and our history that is less than stellar. The billionaire class has mastered the art of turning our weaknesses against us. They constantly use our phobias to pit us against each other while they jet off of the bank with all the money. Occasionally, we get a few scraps like the New Deal of the 1930s, the economic growth of the 50s and 60s and sometimes, even more freedoms!  That said, the power structure remains the same. The good times of the 50s and 60s had something else, community. At least according to our nostalgia fed mythology, this was the case. Please don't run away, stick with me for a minute.

    
Try to think back what it was like before the onset of air conditioning, TV certainly the internet. This was a time when people knew their neighbors by more than their car. They knew each other's children, names and what they did for a living and so on. In short, neighbors were not strangers to each other. Had to work and leave the kids at home? No worries, the neighborhood would watch out for them. This was a time before we were taught to fear one another. There would be neighborhood get-togethers, like cookouts, holiday parties and card games. It's a lot harder to be afraid of someone you and your kids hang out with. The labels and stereotypes just don't hold up so well. But wait, you say, “…wasn't society highly divided along racial and socioeconomic lines?”  Sure, things were far from perfect.  I'm trying to separate the good from the bad here.

Community can take place at home via inviting people over or going to their house, a local church, school or community center. Local parks can also be a place where community can happen. The central idea in my mind is to pull people away from their TVs and computers into the warm sun of the community. The isolation of the television along with the World Wide Web are creating a loneliness and suicide epidemic the likes of which we've never seen before. We are social animals after all that have not evolved to live in isolation. You can create a community! Invite people on your block over for a simple potluck. Start a group to keep the park clean, a community watch or to simply play games outside. Knowing your neighbors makes everyone more secure.

Building community is a great way to counter the power of the oligarchs and their algorithms and talking heads on TV. Community alone cannot solve all of our problems  but I think it is an important step in the right direction. The biggest cost is mostly time.