Community
When did communities stop being communities? No, I’m not playing with words, but I am wondering when we ceased thinking of the people around us as our community. It must have been a long time ago. Certainly, if I stretch back many years to my childhood living in a small London suburb, my everyday life was within the group of people living close by. The children from the houses around me, the families I would see every day. We didn’t have a television, and so I lived in the small world of my family, and close neighbours. Was that what the world had been like for everyone, at some point in the recent past?
Just after the war, it was already an illusion. I know my parents had friends in various parts of London, family in East Anglia and Yorkshire, and a wider network of contacts, friends and colleagues spread over parts of southern and central England. As for those neighbours, in fact we had little to do with most of them. I played with some of the children, but my parents spent almost no time with the adults in those families. We were friends with the couple who lived next door, but since the husband was a government employee, based overseas for long periods of time, even in their case contact was limited, friendship distant.
Things changed when I started attending school. Now I got to know some of the children in my class both at school and outside, especially when there were birthday parties, outings, or simply opportunities to play in the nearby park. I had a range of schoolfriends, but I suspect my parents knew few of them well or their parents. At best they were acquaintances, people to talk to when meeting them in the local shops, but little more than that. Had there been a street party in our areas at the end of the Second World War? It was never referred to, and I doubt it happened. We were a little too stiff and middle class to indulge in such antics. I know there wasn’t a street celebration, houses decorated with flags, banners and bunting, for Elizabeth’s coronation, although I did get a special commemorative plate and mug from school, sadly long since lost. We were inside, glued to the family’s first television.
By the time I was in secondary school, the network of friends began to shrink. No one from my primary school had transferred to my new school, and I found myself in a class with friendly students, but none became ‘best friends’. Later, in my final years, I did develop two close friendships, the result of our subject choices as much as anything else. The three of us were studying geology, making us a small community of scholars – well, perhaps!
Let’s start again. What is a ‘community’? When in doubt, it’s time to go back to the dictionary: a community refers to people who live in a particular area, or a group of people who are considered a unity because of their shared interests or background. That sounds a bit dry! However, the dictionary entry did go on to remind me there is another way in which we think about community, when we talk about ‘a sense of community’, a term that usually implies a caring and friendly feeling towards our neighbours, the group of people around us.
That second definition takes me back to my childhood, but now to a very different part of my life then. It must have been in my last years of primary (elementary) school when I trudged up the hill to the local Anglican church. I can’t now remember what encouraged me to do so, but there I was, embracing a very real community. Since I couldn’t (and still can’t) sing in tune, it quickly became apparent that the best task for me was carrying a tall candlestick, while following the vicar from one spot to another. Alright, that’s a slight exaggeration, as most of the time, I remained in one place. On the upside, I was given the opportunity to light the altar candles before the Sunday service began, and to snuff them out when it was all over.
I can’t imagine what my mother thought about this new activity. She was an atheist but must have decided I could come to no harm. My dad just kept marking students’ lab reports! Did I share interests with the church congregation? I don’t think so, but I did enjoy the ritual. It must have been more than that because, a little older, I decided to get confirmed, and had several weeks of spirited argument with the vicar. That was enjoyable, but I don’t think I engaged much with anyone else. I was a loner, I always have been, but something attracted me to the church, religious issues, and a chance to be away from school, parents, and sport!
The religious connection was to snare me one more time, when in my final year of secondary (high) school, I volunteered to become a youth group leader at a local church. The reason for choosing that role is, like so many other things, lost to the past. It might have been at the prompting of that vicar with whom I’d spent time debating; it might have been part of meeting the requirements to become a Queen Scout; or it might have been the sense I had to do something for others. Whatever the reason, I suddenly found myself in a real community, with lots of people, most my age or even a little younger. The group included girls, a hitherto shunned and possibly dangerous category. With no expectations, and only a little teasing, I found myself among a shared interest community, enjoying pop music, pretending to dance, and taking the group on various outings. On one occasion, we visited the recently rebuilt Coventry Cathedral: I have no idea what we did that day, or what the group spent time on, but I was entranced. For a budding scientist, I was confronted by extraordinary and powerful modern art, stunning architecture, and the forceful conjunction between a bombed-out church shell and a spare, modern new building: truly, it was a spiritual place.
Did the local priest try to capture my attention, and bring me more closely into the church community? I don’t think so. If he tried, he certainly failed. Geology was my passion, and time with the church group was a Thursday night interlude, a break away from study, almost a world away from the rest of my life. I enjoyed the casual friendship of the group, and I cared for them to the extent a buttoned-up serious young boy could. It was, I can see now, a helpful introduction to community in a way that I’d never experienced before. I was about to move out from home and go to university, a place where I would be embraced by and in return love the community I found there.
Arriving at university, the loner was about to find himself with many like-minded people. Not just students like me, but in many cases people who needed support and care. This was especially the case for overseas students from non-English speaking backgrounds, a group which became the focus for various projects I developed. Was it a close community? Not really. Most were postgraduates, often working alone. Their partners (wives, as my college was all male) needed help in adjusting to an alien culture as they battled language, loneliness, and lingering confusions about how to behave and what to do, from going shopping through to confronting a doctor. The university comprised one vast rather inchoate yet embracing community, and for the first time in my life I was part of it, not an outsider peering in!
It was a community in another sense. While we all lived in the town, most were within the university precinct. Years later I realised it was a temporary community, too, existing for you only for long as you were living there. My college was a community in that community. I had little contact with the rest of the town. In today’s terminology, it was life in a (rather large) bubble. When I moved away, several years later, almost all the links and friendships disappeared quickly. Never have I lived in such an inclusive community since.
Once employed, I found myself part of various networks: people from work, family, interest groups, each network scattered geographically, each sustained by some, often only few, areas of common interest. As for where I was living, it was back to my childhood experience, knowing a few neighbours, some becoming close, many just acquaintances. Not exactly adrift but forced to be self-reliant and rather independent. I moved around, living in different cities, and even in different countries, eventually in no less than eighteen different homes. Each time my ‘community’ remained small, a few new people living nearby, the rest tenuous links to earlier places and former friendships, a familiar situation for many people today.
Not everyone I know. A brother-in-law has been working hard to keep close family as his community or, to be more accurate, his wife has done that. She has sustained links among her family members and is now encouraging their children to live on blocks beside the family home. Will this family ‘compound’ enhance a sense of community? Will it create divisions between the family group and others? Or is family the only real community for many people, as kinship provides a shared background and encourages mutual care and responsibility?
The issue of community has been a prominent theme in politics for many years. I am not just referring to the extent to which we have become increasingly self-centred, as I discussed in an earlier blog on The Upswing. This is a related issue, which is that the people we include in our community tend to more homogeneous, often defined by difference, ‘not like’ others. When we were thinking of adding some participants to a discussion group a few years ago, we decided we needed a few Republicans, since the group was comprised of Democrats. Good idea, but the challenge was finding some suitable candidates: who did we know, who would fit in, who we could live with? After some unsuccessful attempts, we quietly agreed to stay as we were, leaving it to another group to cross that chasm.
However, it is the coronavirus that is proving a real touchstone, as leaders and health officials ask us to get vaccinated. The appeals frequently refer to two aims: protecting our selves and protecting the community. In the early stages of the pandemic, most concern was about the elderly and those with ‘pre-existing conditions’, the source of various forms of vulnerability. The issue was clear: if they didn’t get the vaccine, they were at risk of dying from the serious complications caused by the coronavirus. But beyond concern for this high priority group, things became complicated, with various issues affecting risk profiles.
In Australia, the most worrying complication has been the lack of vaccines. Complacency or political ineptitude meant that the ability to vaccinate a significant percentage of the population in the first half of 2021 didn’t exist: the country didn’t have the vaccines and was slow to increase supply. It is easy to lay blame, but in part this was the result of believing Australia was far enough away to remain isolated from high infection countries: it could hold the coronavirus at bay. States used lockdowns, contact tracing and warnings to try to keep the virus out. Even if the strategy had been feasible for the early variants, the Delta COVID-19 virus has proved highly infectious. Stamping out all infections has become an illusory goal. Amid articles about percentages, herd immunity, and other metrics, the need has become quite clear: from a very low level, the country had to increase vaccination levels.
Is there a problem, apart from supply? Yes, there is. For many people, especially men in the 20–40-year-old range, the need to be vaccinated seems far from compelling. These are the same people who fail to have an annual flu vaccination: influenza is trivial and a minor annoyance, and, as far as they are concerned, the same is true for COVID-19. On top of this, just as in many other countries there are a significant number of anti-vaxxers, whose concerns have been amplified by reports of deaths from blood clots, especially from the AstraZeneca vaccine. Those concerns are based on ill-understood death rates, but have been inflamed by news channels, pundits, and even some doctors. It is here that the issue of community plays a key role. For many of these people, there has been little evidence of their ‘community’ being at risk – people like them may be getting infected by the coronavirus, but the effects have been trivial, and the few that have died, they persuade themselves, were old and infirm.
Will that perspective change in the next few months? Appeals to protect the community have had limited results, although increasing infection rates in young people, some experiencing serious effects, may change this. On the other hand, television news programs showing people at sports fixtures or at the beach in various parts of Australia have the effect of encouraging viewers to conclude the risks of vaccination are overstated. They can see other people are getting on with life as they always did, especially as there isn’t a sign over each person at the beach indicating if they are ‘Vaccinated/Not Vaccinated’. Even if there were, coverage would show many unvaccinated people enjoying a lifestyle to which many wanted to return. This underscores the point; our sense of community has narrowed; our obligations to the wider society appear to be having less impact on vaccination rates than we might hope.
What is having an impact is loss of income, even loss of jobs. Lockdowns and other restrictions are pushing more people into economic distress. With their children out of school, parents worry they won’t have the qualifications to get a good job. Gloom over the health impact of the coronavirus has shifted to concern over livelihoods. In that environment, appeals around an amorphous sense of community are less pressing. Getting back to work, getting back to school, that’s tangible, and for most people, the coronavirus appears rather distant, affecting other people in other places. Surely the effects are too terrible to ignore? Not if you live in a country where until recently lockdowns kept the numbers low.
This blog began with reflections on the place of community in my life. To end on that same theme, what does community mean to me today? My local community tends to comprise a few people living close by, mainly next-door neighbours. Yes, we look out for each other. Communities of common interest includes people I have worked with, and with whom I still keep in touch over topics of interest and potential activities. While I have been facilitating discussion groups, they form a small, special category of community. As for the broader community, my engagement is usually at arm’s length. Perhaps I should be volunteering more; I know many friends do. My contribution tends to be financial, supporting appeals. Finally, there’s family, but family isn’t community; it is its own and quite different category.
Taken together, the striking characteristic is that my links are almost always virtual, where physical meetings seldom take place, if ever. It makes me feel that I exemplify our current society: a network of connections, spread over countries, but each person living largely independently. No wonder our world is full of increasingly deep and often bitter divisions. Am I exaggerating? During recent morning walks, I passed our local pub. It was always busy – except in lockdowns! Is this a friendly and caring community? I doubt it. What I observed were several separate clusters, each group keeping apart from the others.
Just as when I was growing up, I still seem to be a loner. Hang on, what about you, my blog readers? Apart from one mistake, I have kept the group list to myself, so you don’t know who is in the group, nor how many it includes. Do bloggers have a community, or just an address list? If I exemplify the fragmentation we see in society, I want to believe I am at one extreme, and you are more deeply embedded in the broader community. I hope so.
