Preserving community

Sam Smith – Yesterday I went to the July 4 parade in my small Maine town, where I have lived for the past fifteen years after spending most of my life in Washington DC. What struck me was that I was not just a spectator, I was another participant.  Just within my eyesight there were hundreds of folks with foldable chairs like mine or who were sitting on the curb and who, like me, knew and greeted some of the others present. And the driver of every vehicle that passed us by waved to us and to others.

It was another reminder of a division in our culture, where the best educated and financed live quite a different lifestyle than their more ordinary contemporaries. Where this elite function primarily within institutions and organizations that have come to replace what we used to think of as community.

And what is community? A commonness based not on success or achievement but on physically shared presence and the manner in which it is handled. You honor and respect others because of their presence and human qualities, not just their success.

I have long suspected that the increase in college graduates has been a major cause of defection from  communal sharing. It turns out, based on research by Statistica, that I had underrated this impact and that in 1960 only 8% of Americans had a college degree, by 2022 this had risen to 38%. More striking, however, is the fact that in 1960 only 41% were high school grads while in 2022 91% were.

As we became better educated we learned more about how to read, talk and write about things but at the cost of a greater gap with those did not share our learning.

Even living in the nation’s capital before I moved to Maine, I resisted this, starting a neighborhood newspaper on Capitol Hill, remaining deeply involved in local issues and even being elected as a neighborhood commissioner for a community  featuring some of the most successful and well educated residents of the city. I didn’t do this with a lot of forethought; it just seemed the right thing to do.  

I suspect having gone to a Quaker high school may had had an effect. Here is what Quaker.org says about it:

Community is implicit in our very name—the Religious Society of Friends. Though each of us has our own personal understanding of, and relationship with, God or Spirit or the divine, it’s important for us to come together in worship, to share messages and insights with each other. Being a community is more than just everyone showing up in the same space at the same time, though; it’s about learning to set aside personal differences and act as a unified force for good…

That holds true for people who aren’t Quakers, as well! We recognize that we exist in relationship to all of humanity, and we strive therefore to live in “right relationship,” knowing that our happiness and well-being is ultimately bound with the happiness and well-being of everyone else. This holds true not just spiritually, but economically and politically—Quakers understand that when one of us is in chains, as the song says, none of us are free.

Although I consider myself a Seventh Day Agnostic I had no philosophical problems while at my Friends school. Further, I am one of six children which early in my life introduced me to the fact that I and my views were just one of many.

In sum I think that what I know is only there to used and shared with others and that many whom know things better than I. In short, I am just one of eight billion people on the earth and being part of a well functioning community is far more important than just being allegedly right alone.