What kind of Community Wouldn't Be Just Another Box?
by the Editor
This issue started out being about Community. Mike Madrid wanted to write about the comic book community. Mat Capper complained that the community at large ignored atheists. So I sent out a general kind of call to all the writers…
What I got back from them surprised me. Because the theme that came back, over and over, in various ways, was a protest at how communities restrict. Now that was interesting. How traditional communities restrict, how they degrade, how they disempower. Quite the opposite of what I was looking for.
Consider: Sue Cullen writes about how wrenching it is for her to realize she's part of the Disabled Community in Disabled Dreaming. Lauren Randolph goes for a huge transformation in her life, and watches in a fury as she's relegated to the Retirement Community. Linda Sandoval is in a fury, too, about the Rich Spoiled Girls who grow up miserable in the affluent communities of Los Angeles. Mat Capper points out that religious communities have frequently worked hard to squeeze reality dry of the truth. And Linda West Eckhardt as a freelancer, which is increasingly the mode of work in our world now, floats free of community: with no help from anywhere, she takes pride in being completely on her own.
Then there were the little green exit signs elsewhere. Mike Madrid ended up with an affectionate look at how a community that had seemed odd, out of step, marginal, Not In The Mainstream, no matter how silly it might look, still has something important to give: a sense of connection, and of reality, and of real passion…no matter on what subject. Most important, I think, what Mike's Community of Geeks gives is a place for a Geek to be a Geek and become…well, any kind of Geek he or she likes. He might be right. The Geek May Indeed Inherit the Earth.
Harvey Lillywhite looks at the poet Richard Jones…who like all poets, seeks to uncover the images that pull us together as a real community, not a false one. And how that True Community goes back and back and back, starting way on the other side of the horizon.
And I thought hard about the stories that knit all the little communities into that One Big One (Lost Treasure and Four Cats) , the stories passed through time from mother to daughter and on down…
What's interesting is how the conventional 'communities' are the restrictive ones. They are the ones that seem to cramp their individual members, restricting what they might become. But with communities, is that always the case? Does any community inevitably imprison its individual member in a cage of spoken and unspoken rules? Or is this only true of false communities, of artificial ones brought together for artificial goals?
We all know that one of the main unsolved philosophical problems is how to resolve the rights and duties of the individual versus those of the community. How can a community protect its individuals and their growth while maintaining itself as a creative force? And how can the individual perform her/his duties toward the community without losing her/his own creativity?
The secret, I suspect, is in having that creativity as a goal. A living creative force, that seeks to widen the range of freedom for its members, can never be anything but real — it can't be artificial. By creative force, I mean the energy that moves things out and up and sometimes (almost by accident) forward. You need anarchy for such a force. But you also need — oh paradox — structure, too.
This force has been called by a lot of different names. But the best one, I think, even though it's so overused that when we see it we have to stop and think about what it really means, is Love. Love reminds the community that its purpose is to guard and guide the individual. Love reminds the individual that her/his purpose is to participate with her/his fellows in making the community a better place.
There is no other goal, after all. Any other goal is worse than artificial: it's false. In theological language, it's a sin.
So how do we define that Love? After all, the word's been misused for every kind of oppressive act. Well. Maybe EAP writers would like to have a crack at that?
For now, here's my definition:
Love is the force that creates growth…and the space for that growth. It's what pushes us to want as much good for the Other as for ourselves. And it's the force that leads us to understand that the Other may need something else for their growth than we, in our arrogance, think is right.
You know, there's a good, concrete, specific example of Love in Hannah Mermelstein's announcement this month of her Birth Unplugged photo project. The Birthright Unplugged group works with children in Palestinian villages and documents, oh, all sorts of surprising things…There's no theory there, just a rolling up of shirt sleeves and getting to work….
In the Todblog, the British Ministry of Defense predicts that the middle class is going to be the place where this kind of revolution might really happen…and this gives us a lot of hope…
And I had to add a short article that first appeared in THE CATHOLIC WORKER, by Bill Griffin . It's a grim reminder about how forcing an individual to act against Love, in the name of a false community, is an act of murder. How many suicides have there been, will there be, uncounted, caused by the mortal sins of our Empire, which compels its members to act against human values and their own conscience?