Why on Earth Would Anyone Ever Want to Build a Community?

Notes from a former community organizer.

When you’re trying to learn about survival, you hear this a lot:

Cities will become death traps.

It’s not helpful.

We have to face an unpleasant truth, that 300 million Americans aren’t going to move out to the country. If we all did that, it would collapse rural ecosystems. 300 million people and counting can’t homestead. From there, conversations mutate into platitudes about building community and the fate of the lone wolf. I’ve got a few things to say about all this. I’ll keep it interesting.

Let’s talk about community.

It’s probably the core aspect of surviving in a city. Everything else depends on your ability to cooperate with your neighbors. Growing food. Obtaining water. Quelling violence and unrest. And so on. In a city, other people not knowing how to survive will absolutely have an impact on you. Their problems will become your problems. Forget the warm, gooey emotional stuff. Maybe your neighbors will never come running to your defense in the middle of the night. Still, you want to do everything in your power to prevent them from becoming a threat and a liability. And if you happen to be a good person, something inside you just can’t stand to watch suffering. Some of us already have plenty of experience on that front.

We know it’s not easy.

In fact, some of us who’ve actually managed communities might want to run screaming from that word, because we’ve been there. It’s rough. I’ve never managed a commune, but I used to run an entire program that oversaw dozens of teachers and hundreds of students. I’m learning how to grow potatoes, but I already know how to manage people. It’s not fun. I kind of hate it, and I’ve wanted a break from it.

For a few years, I even trained and supervised AP English teachers all over the state. I planned conferences, workshops, and festivals. I drove around and observed classrooms and offered constructive feedback to adults who weren’t always receptive, and often mistook me for a subordinate.

I scheduled all the classes. I wrote all the reports. I managed all the interpersonal conflicts. I oversaw the discipline issues.

I attended all the endless meetings.

It was a lot.

During the summers, I helped run academic camps with dozens of staff and hundreds of kids. I started out as an RA and worked my way up to a site supervisor. In my 20s, I was putting other people’s kids to bed, taking them to the hospital, dealing with their nightmares and anxiety attacks, planning activities for them, and controlling my anger when they told me off.

I had to manage athletes with affluenza who were twice my size, who sometimes threatened to “whip” me for my attitude.

Then said they were “joking.”

I’ve dealt with men in their 30s throwing tantrums in their own classrooms and bullying their own students, then quitting halfway through the semester. I’ve calmed down vice chancellors screaming profanities at their own interns. I’ve talked down potential school shooters with real mental health problems and real guns. I’ve put my own life on the line, because I didn’t have a choice. I’ve wrangled with bureaucrats over paperwork. I’ve comforted students who were dealing with homelessness, terminal illness, dying parents, extreme abuse, suicide, you name it. I’ll never forget the day one of my teachers came into my office, closed the door, and told me one of her students had exposed himself to her.

So, I get it.

Even when I was a kid, my mom didn’t take care of me. I took care of her. I took care of my brother. Toward the end of high school, I was doing the cooking and cleaning. I was buying the groceries. I was doing the laundry. I cleaned up after my mom’s bathroom accidents. I took her to the hospital when she fell down and cut herself. When she got lost, I drove her home. When she forgot to pick me up from track practice, I backpacked the three miles.

Then I started dinner.

When she said I was an alien clone and tried to kill me, I didn’t get to run away from that. I had to stay. Not because it felt good. Not because I got points for building community. That’s just how we survived.

When someone starts talking about the virtues of community, it’s easy to tell if they’ve mainly stood on the receiving end—not the giving. They have no idea what it takes to run one. They have no idea how many nights and weekends you give up, and how much of yourself you sacrifice for it.

For some of us, community often means other people standing around complaining while you do half the work. It’s people promising to do things and then backing out at the last minute. It’s people not showing up. Or it’s the wrong people showing up and getting in the way, slowing everything down. It’s listening to the ones who did nothing tell you how to do everything better next time.

If you’ve been here, then you might smirk a little when someone else warns you about being the lone wolf. Are you kidding me?

You mean I don’t have to worry about everyone?

I can just take care of myself?

Sounds kinda nice.

I’ve been trying out the whole lone wolf thing, and I gotta tell ya. It’s been refreshing. I’ve enjoyed it. I like not having to solve everyone’s problems and deal with all their bullshit. Part of me wishes it could go on forever. So when someone starts talking about how I can’t survive without community, I think what they mean is they wouldn’t survive without people like us.

Anyway:

That’s the life that awaits anyone who wants to build a community. Those of us who’ve been responsible for communities in the past aren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of doing it during an apocalypse. We’ve already seen people at their best and their worst, and the worst is a lot to handle. We know how it’s going to go. Collapse is a group project where you’ll get stuck doing a lot of the work, mainly so that your neighbor doesn’t bash you over the head for your carrots one day or start leaving big poops in the middle of your yard.

That’s why you’re going to build the community. Not because you want to. Not because it’s going to feel good. But for simple, practical reasons. To keep those around you from getting you killed.

That’s why.

For months now, I’ve wondered why it irritates me so much to hear the word “community” thrown around with such a casual tone. I’ve wondered why a big part of me is so reluctant to engage in community building.

Well, that’s why.

For many of us, the ones who’ve run the communities in the past, we know how much of ourselves we have to give in order to make them functional. Maybe you understand all this, and it’s why you’re in no hurry to start doing that just yet, even though you also understand that it’s going to be imperative.

I didn’t have the option of not taking care of my mom. If I didn’t, she would literally just lie on the couch until you could smell her from the driveway. She would sit and smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and eat candy. She would crap on the carpet. She would fall in the bathroom and start to bleed out. It was hard to love someone who constantly berates you and threatens to kill you, but for me it was a crash course in a fundamental truth. Your well-being is bound up with the well-being of others, no matter what you think about them, no matter how much you want to get away from the responsibility. It’s there, always.

You have to take care of the people around you, even if you don’t want to, even if you don’t love them, even if you don’t like them very much.

That’s the hard side of community.

Building a community and taking on a lot of the work yourself might be the only way you preserve some sense of order and calm in your corner of the world. It’s how you’re going to keep yourself alive.

Why on earth would you build a community?

That’s why.