Tag: Community

The measure of a community isn’t how it treats insiders, but rather how it treats outsiders.

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[…] I now have a different view of small towns, one based in part on how they sometimes treat those they perceive as outsiders. Because I’ve had that experience as well, and it can be grim enough. […]

Over the course of our 12 years in Columbia, my family slowly but surely progressed from insiders to outsiders, beginning with the adoption of our youngest daughter, a beautiful girl from Ethiopia. My other two children, who are blond with blue eyes, were never followed by store employees; my youngest daughter was. My older kids were never told by their schoolmates that parents didn’t allow them to play with “kids like you,” or that it wasn’t “safe” to come to their house. Or that their “muddy” faces weren’t welcome on a hayride at a local farm. My youngest daughter has had all those experiences. She has also been told that slavery was necessary to “help” Black people to be ready for life in America.

No, none of this came from our friends, who were appalled right along with us. But we were forced to see a different part of our community, one that made our family feel far less like we were truly at home. […]

And that’s when I realized a truth that should have been blindingly obvious from the start: The measure of a community isn’t how it treats insiders, but rather how it treats outsiders. It is easy to be kind to your friends and allies. And when you experience that kindness, it can turn a small-town community into something like a security blanket. This is where you belong. But when you experience cruelty, a small town can be something else entirely. It can make you feel trapped and uneasy, as if there is no place to rest, as if your home isn’t truly your home.

What is your experience like if you’re the only Black or brown person in a sea of white? What is your experience if your household is a blue island in a red ocean, or a red island in a blue ocean? How much grace is extended to you when you fall or stumble? How much tolerance do you experience when you disagree? That is the measure of a place, not its love for its favorite daughters and sons.

— David French, from “Try Tolerance in a Small Town” (The New York Times · July 27, 2023)

Photo: David & Nancy French with their children. The Daily Herald.

What we need most at the end of the day…

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In a recent Times article, the reporter Emma Goldberg wrote about how the rise of social media and influencer power has made it such that young people, in particular, find their livelihood, success and sense of self inextricably entwined with an online presentation. She wrote, “With personal branding, the line between who people are and what they do disappears. Everything is content.” A strange, exhausting new twist in being human is that each day, each of us must decide how much of ourselves, our family life, thoughts, work, photos and feelings we will share with strangers online. Goldberg quoted Tom Peters, a marketing writer, who explained that, we are each “head marketer for the brand called You.”

To reduce ourselves to brands, however, is to do violence to our personhood. We turn ourselves into products, content to be evaluated instead of people to be truly known and loved. We convert the stuff of our lives into currency.

This new way of interacting with the world is driving institutional dysfunction, personal anxiety and the hollowing out of ourselves…Klein confessed that social media had made him hungry for validation. It offers us, he said, a steady drumbeat of “You exist. You are seen.” This longing to be seen and validated is universal, but this desire has been co-opted by technologists to capture more and more of our time and attention…

I have gotten letters from time to time from readers declaring me their pastor, and of course, I’m flattered and grateful. I hope to be of help to them, yet I cannot be their pastor. I cannot hold their hands and pray over them in the hospital. I cannot grieve with them after the loss of a loved one or rejoice when they land a job. A pastor and the work of local churches more broadly are tethered to a place, an institution and a particular people, with all the complexity, hilarity, struggle and mystery of their lives.

What we need most at the end of the day has nothing to do with influence or brands. We need quiet beauty and enduring truth that we share with those who walk this journey with us…

—  Tish Harrison Warren, from “The Temptations of the ‘Personal Brand’” (New York Times, January 29, 2023). Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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I ask him what this extraordinarily beautiful and harsh landscape reveals about his political character. “Well, I’m not a man of means,” he said. “We pay for things as we go. We are compelled to work, to do things with our hands. That gives you a different appreciation of life. Things have a bigger meaning.” Bowers said that his core values were instilled in him as a child growing up within a conservative Republican tradition. He is the father of seven children, one of whom, Kacey, died last year. “Family, faith, community – these are values at a very core level. You don’t survive out here, on land like this, alone.”

— Ed Pilkington, from “Rusty Bowers, Ousted Republican reflects on Trump, democracy and America: ‘The place has lost its mind’ (The Guardian, August 21, 2022)

Portrait: Yahoo News of Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers is sworn in during the fourth hearing by the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the US Capitol on June 21, 2022.

Sunday Morning

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My father had died in a single-vehicle accident in California, far from those who knew and loved him. As I grieved, my father’s death brought a certain clarity about my calling as a husband and parent. If my relationship with my dad had been marked by brokenness, I wanted my relationship with my wife and children to be marked by healing. It also forced me to re-evaluate my career. Impressing other writers and academics ceased to be my goal. Instead, I would focus on using my words to find beauty and hope. I couldn’t write a different ending for my father’s story, but I could show that a different ending was possible for others.

Over the past year and a half, many people have experienced something similar to what I did when my father died. I am not the only one who has received a terrifying call that wakes us from our slumber and changes us forever. It may have been a notification about a loved one going on a ventilator rather than dying in a car crash, but the trauma is the same. This pandemic has left conversations and lives cut short…

All these changes that people are embarking on during the pandemic make me think that we weren’t that happy before the pandemic. What about our lives prevented us from seeing things that are so clear to us now? When I talked to friends and neighbors about this, two themes emerged. The pandemic has disabused us of the illusion of time as a limitless resource and of the false promise that the sacrifices we make for our careers are always worth it.

Before the pandemic, we knew we were going to die, but we did not believe it. Maybe we believed it, but considered it a problem to be dealt with later. In the meantime, exercise and a reasonable diet was the tithe we paid to our fears. We believed we had time…

We have had to consider our collective mortality. And we are now faced with the question of meaning. Like the biblical psalmist says, “We have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped.” (Psalm 124:7). Covid-19 threatened to capture us in its snare, but thus far we have eluded it.

What shall we do with this opportunity?

— Dr. Esau McCaulley, from “We Weren’t Happy Before the Pandemic,Either.” Dr. McCaulley is a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois., (NY Times, August 21, 2021)

Evolution

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Cover of The New Yorker Sept 21, 2020 issue by Artist Chris Ware: “I live in the quiet, relatively diverse, and leafy “village” of Oak Park, literally across the street from Chicago, and all summer long I’ve seen neighborhood almost-but-not-quite get-togethers, not unlike what I drew here…I think vastly more people still try to get along in America than not. Our cities aren’t exclusively anarchic blast zones, and the suburbs aren’t all xenophobic cloisters. Yet, now, the weather is cooling, and we’re all heading back inside to await the results of what will surely be the most contested election of our lifetimes. The real fear is what may result: not a democracy or a republic but something that somehow stifles both.”