It Takes A Village

On the heels of Independence Day, this quote really spoke to me. Like many, I spent this 4th of July grateful for the opportunities I have been given as an American, but we have an obligation to not squander those opportunities.

I often hear from people about all the problems with the US, but I believe the biggest problem we face is differentiating between having the freedom to do whatever we want and having the freedom to do what is right. Just because we have a protected freedom to do something doesn’t mean we have to or should. The term “civic responsibility” has left our vocabulary, and it extends to more than just the democracy of public elections. Because we have not experienced a lack of freedoms in our lifetimes, we have become spoiled.

With such freedoms as we are granted, we have a responsibility to act in ways to protect those freedoms. One cannot speak about the past without hearing “things were better back then”. But what was better? Our communities were better due to that civic responsibility.

One reason is because of the lifestyle we have grown accustomed to. The work day no longer ends at 5pm, and not everyone has weekends off. The emails come rolling in all hours of the night, and they pile up quickly. The need to perform continuously means we are never mentally clocked out of work, and with that theft of our personal time has come a cost: the lack of community. Certainly, I am aware of other causes to this lack of community – drugs, social media, etc – but I believe our focus on the work life has shifted our community and lead to these other stressors.

Case in point, volunteerism is down across the board. We are severely down in the number of civic organizations and the membership in those organizations. Many say they are too busy to get involved, and they aren’t completely wrong. I was just speaking with a friend about the trend in raising children currently, and the responsibilities that come with that are immensely greater. Kids are involved in multiple activities, hobbies, and traveling sports leagues. It’s more costly and time-consuming to be a parent, and that means something else usually gets sacrificed.

I’ve been involved in community volunteerism my whole life with the exception of during the college years when I focused on my studies. When I returned to my hometown, I wanted to give back to the community that shaped me. I was fortunate enough to be given employment in my hometown, which allowed me to serve my community on and off the clock. Now, in my 10th year working in my hometown, I have made it a priority to be an active participant in the school and community of Warwood.

As a person without children, it is still important to me to focus on education as the foundation of our community. We are teaching our children more than reading and math. Social and emotional learning (SEL) and collaboration are all things that education teaches our children but aren’t listed as a letter grade on a report card. Education has been under tremendous attack the last five years, especially in West Virginia, but when we devalue education we are also devaluing the important roles our teachers play in developing our children into good people. There’s a collaboration between parent(s) and school staff that used to exist that seems to be eroding.

My father taught high school for 34 years, and I can speak first hand to how hard he worked to develop his students. I can also speak to how much time he spent outside of school constructing lesson plans and grading assignments and examinations. He was always working on something. Over the years, though, he saw less collaboration from the parents and more criticism of his colleagues.

And social media has caused us to question the best of intentions of humanity and micro-criticize our community without leaving our house. We no longer need to attend a city council meeting or community event to be heard, Every little problem is amplified, and we’ve become increasingly pessimistic. I mentioned in my last post about how we’ve taken the humanity out of healthcare by having people (notice I didn’t say healthcare professionals) who are not looking patients in the eyes making decisions about our healthcare. Well, the same is true for our community. We hide behind a keyboard and say things about people we wouldn’t dare say to their face.

Those that know me really well know I have always had an interest in Fred Rogers. Mr. Rogers had such an amazing perspective of what it took to nurture children and make a neighborhood. Rogers spoke of the role of being good neighbors in a community:

We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then, there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.

Fred Rogers

Fred Rogers was deeply aware of the interconnectivity of each of us in the greater concept of community, and he realized this needed to be developed in children at a young age. Children need to be developed into civic-minded individuals looking out for each other. Volunteerism is not an intrinsic quality in humanity but something needing to be taught and developed.

Especially now with so much stress to our mental wellness, more people should be embracing volunteerism as a mechanism to stay connected into the community instead of isolation. We need to work together instead of retreating to our homes. Volunteerism has been proven to provide mental and physical benefits, yet we are at an all-time low (at least in my mind) in people building the community they wish to belong to.

All this to say, nothing in this life is free, including freedom. We must work to protect it. We must work to foster it by developing our communities with people who are willing to come out from behind their computer monitors and work together to find commonalities to build from instead of dividing into factions, political or otherwise. Nothing in this world should be absolutely black and white. We are a world of nuance that is being pushed into absolutes, and we need to remember there is more we share in common than that divide us. We may disagree in the how but I think we all believe in the why. Why is community important? Why is freedom important?