Community

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith - The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.

Our own experiences with community may in large part represent something from which we have fled — a fouled-up family, a stifling neighborhood, an oppressive religion — rather than that which we seek. We may have declared, either consciously or unconsciously, never to go through that again. And so we look for maximum freedom and decline to make the trade-offs — except, of course, when we are working, commuting, or buying those things that are supposed to make us free. In the end, ironically, we may find ourselves having mostly freed ourselves from voluntary associations. Those relationships, appointments, and activities required by our status, employment, or to pay for our totems of liberation, are not impeded at all by our declaration of independence; rather they sit there happily munching away at what we, with an increasing sense of nostalgia, call our “free” time.

Communities are easiest to build in times of stress or out of painful need. Impressive self-sufficient communities were constructed in New York’s Harlem and Washington’s Shaw in response to racial exclusion. Similarly, to many veterans, few communities can compete with the bonds created under fire. Yet wistful as such memories may be, few would really attempt to recover them by reviving segregation or going back to war.

Communities do things that individuals can’t and things that institutions won’t. From the friend who drives you home when you have had too much to drink, to farmers rebuilding a neighbor’s barn after a tornado, people draw strength from others that is unavailable in isolation. And in the process, they become themselves.

Throughout history, community order has largely grown out of the cooperation and effectiveness of individuals, schools, families, and the strength of local institutions.