Why I want to build community
Community Part 3
Now that Community Tales is a series, time for me to explain myself. And the starting point is, folks, things are bleak. The majority of the country has been left to fend for ourselves, having to work long hours at low pay just to afford the things we need to maintain a life: adequate living quarters, clean food and water, and healthcare. And then we’re forced to pay even more just for the tools we need to keep a job on top of all that.
A convicted felon is running for president and he’s polling even with the establishment centrist. Our elected leaders would rather ignore the rising right-wing tide in favor of propping up an authoritarian apartheid state, and slow-walking tiny crumbs of OK policy here and there, none of them addressing the literal ecologic collapse we see happening before our eyes. And the unelected illegitimate highest court of the land is stripping away the legal foundations of the bare democracy we’ve fought and bled and died for.
I could go on but you see where I’m going with this. It’s bad and feels like it’s getting worse. How can I keep going in the face of all this bad news?
Community, that’s how. I think that’s the key. We need to start building our own communities, band together, try to put together our own safety net. There’s way more of us than there are of our leadership and the billionaires who buy their attention. We need to organize. We are stronger together.
We need to reject fear and hopelessness. We need to move our bodies and dance. We need to join our arms, raise our voices, and sing. Joy is what fascism wants to stomp out, so we need to find joy in the world. There is still so much that is beautiful, even if it feels apocalyptic.
The world may be ending, but death comes for all of us, rich or poor, young or old. While we still draw breath, we need to love one another, we need to create and write and be beautiful. And we need to do it together, in every space and public forum we can, right out where the cowardly liberals and grasping conservatives can see us.
It’s difficult, I know. I am aware of what happens when we try to fight back. So many of us have paid the ultimate price for resistence. But it’s the one move we have. We need to build our own better world.
The old labor union battle cry was “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will!” If our homes are our First Places, and our jobs are our Second Places, where are our Third Places? Where is our time and place to do whatever we please? The demands of longer hours at work to crank out the productivity that our billionaire overlords steal from us have encroached on our Whatever We Please time and space.
We have lost our Third Places for Whatever We Please over the decades. Our billionaires and politicians want us to work until we’re too tired to do or think about anything else. But we can claw back that time and space, if we start to rely on ourselves for help, for healthcare, for food and drink, and housing. It’s a reality that labor always produces more than it needs. That means a little bit of our labor can provide enough for all of us, provided we don’t let the capitalists steal it from us.
I’m trying to start where I live, by reaching out to my literal neighbors, the people who share this apartment complex with me. This is the community I live in, and this is where I plan to build my metaphorical community as well.
Together we are stronger, but we have to work at it.