Joanna M., “Let us consider this notion of 'belonging' in relation to our communities. In our modern societies, with few exceptions, we don't really have any sense of community. We drive our cars somewhere else to work, then we come home and spend most of our time in our houses, or we visit with our circle of friends, who may live miles away. We often don't even know our neighbors. We identify with sports teams or TV families more than we identify with our communities or neighbors. We are likely to feel 'involved' with remote wars and affairs in Washington (Ottawa, London...), and have little interest or concern with local affairs. We don't have a real sense of 'belonging' in our communities, other than as a place where our individual comforts happen to be located. We can move to another town, get another job and similar house, and hardly notice the change.
Now consider what sense of 'belonging' we would be likely to experience in a self-governing community. For one thing, we would be much better acquainted with our neighbors and fellow residents generally, if we worked with one another to make community policy and set community agendas. And certainly we would feel more involved in what's going on in our community, since we would be participating directly in its affairs. Beyond that, we would think of our community as a welcoming place, where we are known and where our voice is listened to. We would feel a part of our community's successes in dealing with its problems. We would feel a sense of ownership — and of belonging. We would see it as ‘our community' rather than just as a place where our house is located.
Our feelings toward other community members would be a bit like our feelings toward family members. Just as two brothers might be frequently at each other's throats, there might be people in the community we don't like and don't get along with. But as with the brothers, we would would come to our fellow's aid if they were really in trouble. We would see one another as 'partners in running our community.' There would be a sense of comradery in the shared project of improving our local quality of life. Our community would be like a family-writ-large, a place where we find support, where our needs matter, where our fellows care about us, where there is a ‘place for us.’
As individuals and families we would have our own life paths, our unique ambitions and our autonomy, but we would understand that our own autonomy and well-being can be best served when we respect the autonomy and well-being of our fellows. We would realize that there is a trade-off between freedom and responsibility. By our participation in decision making we would be learning how to make such trade-offs so that we all benefit and all have a sense of real freedom -- rather than enjoying 'privileges granted by the state,’ privileges that can be taken away at any time, as we have been recently learning."
Don't all of us, in our hearts, dream of this kind of ‘belonging’? To live in a supportive society where we 'have a place' and 'have a say’? Don't we all yearn for communities where we can be closer to nature, more connected to place, where we have more direct control over our lives, where we help new neighbors build barns, where children respect the wisdom of their elders, and the elders respect children's need to grow up and learn for themselves? Isn't there a memory deep in our hearts of 'belonging' in a society in this way? Of being part to a 'larger supportive family’? Don't we often feel like 'lost souls' in our modern, isolating societies? Is this not a big part of the reason why there is so much anti-social behavior, anxiety, depression, and so many stress-related illnesses, psychological hang ups, dysfunctional families, and suicides?
My own belief, based partly on what my heart tells me, and partly on my investigations into anthropology and psychology, is that being part of a supportive community is a natural human need, on a par with the need to be part of a supportive family. This is not to say that people might not move to a different community, or spend time as world travellers, but as a basic infrastructure for society, our ‘natural condition' is to grow up in a supportive community ('it takes a village to raise a child'), and to participate as equals in our society's governance as adults.
"'The Wizard of Oz' can be seen as an insightful metaphor for our human condition. We (Dorothy) are now in Oz (the modern world), with glittering lights, fantastic castles, Great Witches and Wizards, and we are lost, we don't belong. We have only Toto (family) as a connection to home (belonging), and to Toto we hang on for dear life. We thought we wanted to run away from home and find 'freedom', and we learn that what we really want is to return home, to our heart’s desire, to where Auntie Em still waits, to our native soil, our beloved Kansas, where we ‘belong.'
The conservative New York Times journalist David Brooks notes in his book On Paradise Drive (2005) that his countrymen“don’t perceive where they live as a destination, merely as a dot on the flowing plane of multidirectional movement. The simple fact is that Americans move around more than any other people on earth. In any given year, 16 percent of Americans move, compared with about 4 percent of the Dutch and Germans, 8 percent of the Brits, and about 3 percent of the Thais. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population survey, only a quarter of American teenagers expect to live in their hometowns as adults, which reflects a truly radical frame of mind. Today as always, Americans move so much and so feverishly that they change the landscape of reality more quickly than we can adjust our mental categories.”
"As so often before, these are designated victims — people without official sanction, often without official friends, who are struggling to preserve their places, their values, and their lives as they know them and prefer to live them against the agencies of their own government, which are using their own tax money against them.
The only escape from this destiny of victimization has been to 'succeed' — that is, to 'make it' into the class of exploiters, and then to remain so specialized and so 'mobile' as to be unconscious of the effects of one's life or livelihood. This escape is, of course, illusory, for one man's producer is another's consumer, and even the richest and most mobile will soon find it hard to escape the noxious effluents and fumes of their various public services.
Let me emphasize that I am not talking about an evil that is merely contemporary or 'modern,' but one that is as old in America as the white man's presence here. It is an intention that was organized here almost from the start.
This culturicide, 'the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements which make a one group of people distinct from other groups,' unfolds worldwide today, as a result of ongoing violent globalization. DeVoto noted in the early 1950s that the “New World was a constantly expanding market; no limit to its development could be foreseen and indeed there was no limit. Its volume in gold was enormous but it had still greater value in that it expanded and integrated the industrial systems of Europe. It was thus a powerful force in the development of capitalism and nationalism.”
Joanna, let’s get back to love: to the Girl from the North Country, a song by Bob Dylan. During the sixties all the boys dreamed about her. Men are just as romantic as women.
May 27, 1963
If you’re travelin' in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to one who lives there
For she once was a true love of mine
If you go when the snowflakes storm
When the rivers freeze and summer ends
Please see she has a coat so warm
To keep her from the howling winds
Please see if her hair hangs long
If it rolls and flows all down her breast
Please see for me if her hair's hangin' long
For that’s the way I remember her best
I’m a-wondering if she remembers me at all
Many times I’ve often prayed
In the darkness of my night
In the brightness of my day
So if you’re travelin' in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to one who lives there
For she once was a true love of mine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JncbFS5ek74
“A true love,” Joanna, will soon show his face. You will need him, for we stand on the eve of a Third World War. It is indeed bewildering, because Europe, too, paid a very high price in the twentieth century for the neoliberal narcissism of 'winner takes all.' The Third World still suffers under Western aggression and exploitation. However, one should not forget that the very first victims of European aggression were the indigenous people of America. Everything that happened to them subsequently befell other peoples who had been brought under white and Christian rule by force. Ultimately, their own white working class inevitably became victim as well, a process that continues undisturbed to this day. The Native Americans were, as it were, the guinea pigs of modern Western neoliberalism, with the following consequence “it was cataclysmic. A culture was forced to change much faster than change could be adjusted to. All corruptions of culture produce breakdowns of morale, of communal integrity, and of personality, and this force was as strong as any other in the white man's subjugation of the red man,” according to Bernard DeVoto. Wendell Berry adds: “I have quoted these sentences from DeVoto because, the obvious differences aside, he is so clearly describing a revolution that did not stop with the subjugation of the Indians, but went on to impose substantially the same catastrophe upon the small farms and the farm communities, upon the shops of small local tradesman of all sorts, upon the workshops of independent craftsmen, and upon the households of citizens. It is a revolution that is still going on. The economy is still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat. The Indian became a redskin, not by loss in battle, but by accepting a dependence on traders that made necessities of industrial goods. This is not merely history. It is a parable."
At the end of that centuries-long cycle, Europe — where the raids had begun — stands on the verge of becoming a ‘redskin,’ not by loss in battle, but by accepting a dependence on Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. The West is being sacrificed by the U.S. as a pawn to absorb the first blow within NATO in the planned armed conflict with Russia and subsequently with China. Brussels, where not only the EU headquarters is situated but also that of NATO, has made itself dependent on the elite interests of Washington and Wall Street. Herein lies both the irony of history and its logical consequence, for ‘he who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword,’ as the Jewish bible warns the Christians. Brussels is the metaphor for bureaucracy, corrupt politicians, and the military-industrial complex. All three are working together for an impending Armageddon. None of the three is capable of altering the course of history. Only the population can do this, the masses who have allowed themselves to be led astray all this time. But to do so, one must first have a clear picture of the essential problem with which we are confronted. Wendell Berry formulates the issue as follows “We can understand a great deal of our history by thinking of ourselves as divided into conquerors and victims. We are divided between exploitation and nurture. We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.
Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health — his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order — a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization, the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, ‘hard facts’; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.”
Joanna, I am still talking about love, love of nature, just as miraculous as love between a women and a man. Later more. In the meantime: take it easy, your time will come.
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