Of the Community

At the time we were too pressed with the urgency of bringing up children, holding down jobs and keeping a wheel on the wagon to notice or comprehended. Those twice a day rituals of meeting at the school gate to drop off or pick up the children were crucial. There were many other subsequent meetings, whether at youth activities, secondary school, sports days, village fetes, but this one, the meeting at school gate was decisive. Now much longer in the tooth, having gone through the many stages of maturing, I have the records to look back at. I can see so clearly how our paths, our children's paths, their friends paths and the social network that I find myself working within are to a very significant degree derived from those early school gate gatherings. This is when we met, got to know each others names, found out about where they lived, gained an inkling of their work and lifestyle. Through these early contacts we got to meet up with others all moving around in similar related circles. This is our community dynamic, the social network of interconnected families with some commonality of past experience or interest linking us together. I not saying lasting friends, I am not even saying companions sharing mutual values, just people who know and can recognise each other and have some basic instinct of the others likely response. Sufficient to give us a common bond, our community, we know you and you are part of us.

Of course in my lifetime we have gone from a plurality of community meeting opportunities, sharing a convivial drink together, to the routine church attendance, to of course the schooling, but also the village shop, doctors surgery, the village social life, to our present state. Even the gathering of parents at school gates is now to be discouraged, children are dropped off out of cars, closure of so many village facilities transferred to remote detached outside communities, a withdrawal from localised activity and diversification to remote anonymised centres. Before my time it was even more intense, you worked where you lived, you seldom travelled beyond your own community and your employer was your load and judge about your moral conduct. I am not bemoaning about changing times, but we do need to understand the processes that meld communities together before we can hope to plan how to reforge community connections in this new dissipated age. Dissipated, because we are longer bound to place but follow our economic fortunes, we are not tied to family and now have serial families and our place of work can be anywhere around the globe working at anything from a smartphone to a command centre. How in a loose fit society do we develop any sense of community? Is it even possible we can find anything we can bond too? Is the only resolution a drift to Totalitarianism, when some detached remote authority determines and controls each and everyone of our freedoms to act. A total loss of all independence because without a tying in to a community the options are only Anarchy or Totalitarianism.

I talk of village life. A town and even a City is but a collection of villages, the collective of villages have another dimension, their relationship with the greater whole of the Town. There are finite limits to how wide a group of people you can relate to and still feel sufficiently close as to bond as a group of Us against Them, the outsiders. No hard and fast figures, different for each of us, the individuals that we are. But there are limits, that number, that distance, that crossing of the line is just that too far. A finite village is clear and simple, a Town is a lot more ambiguous with a lot more factors coming into play. In the end we have up until now related to the place we recognise as our place that we stayed in for some length of time, sufficient to have made some contact with other members of that place. As we withdraw more and more inwardly, within the secure four walls we inhabit, we have less and less connection to the community. The communal actions appear to become increasingly irrelevant. We are isolated islands and Others control all things beyond our island. This then is our challenge. How do we in this fast changing age break down the island defences and help people to reconnect with all those around them that they actually do depend on for the quality of their actual life? Clearly not by central Them government. The Us of the Community have to be given back meaningfully the reins of their own destiny. Not the current government vogue of tokenised responsibility whilst the real control and purse remains tightly held by Westminster, but actual devolved power and accountability. If is important enough to tangibly affect their quality of life, then just maybe the island drawbridges might come down to see what they can influence.