Community Challenged

There is an age old debate in our society about wealth sharing that goes something like this.

One side: I worked hard for what I have and see no reason to share with someone who has not worked as hard and therefore doesn’t have as much wealth as I do. *This side doesn’t talk much about inherited riches.

Another side: There are people within our society that, through no fault of their own, have not had the opportunity to get rich. (Read Outliers by Malcolm Galdwell)  In the spirit of community caring, we offer to take care of these folks.

Kayak community enjoying the Bow River together.

Down through time, humans survived by building and caring for a community. We do this for the selfish reason that it is necessary for our own survival. For millennia, shunning was a death sentence.

Imagine a caveman hunter that excels in bringing home the kill. He is loved and looked up to in his community. He is valuable and everyone knows it. Then one day on the hunt, he gets injured and cannot hunt for a time or for all time. He and the community survive because he is only the best hunter, not the only hunter and immediately there is a new best hunter.

I can see everyone nodding at this. Yes, you say, it is right and fair that the community supports the injured hunter. But why is that right and it is not right that the community help others?

Thai women work in community to accomplish a large task.

We humans are terribly fickle. We marginalize members of our society for all kinds of reasons. We create reasons why a person is not worth supporting that range from lack of intelligence to lack of motivation and we make these calls on superficial information and hearsay.

What I believe the majority forget is that the more people we marginalize, the more we limit our community’s ability to thrive. We relegate people to the bottom rungs of society without giving them a chance to climb higher. Ask yourself how often you take the measure of a person just by looking at them.

On the one hand, we expend massive efforts to make sure every baby born lives to fulfill its human potential. Then we pull away when that potential shows itself to be a need for life-long assistance. Now this individual is not a baby that deserves our money, time, hope and faith, but an adult that doesn’t cut the mustard in our dog eat dog society and should be cut off to fend for itself. We throw tax dollars into social programs like coins into a fountain wishing that the pennies would turn into riches.

Cambodian men gather on the river bank.

Well, no that’s not right you say. We don’t do that. Umm, yes we do; all the time.

Even children born hale and hearty only get our support for so long. We have normalized abandoning our our children if they don’t conform to a certain life path by set deadlines.
Not going to finish high school? Get out, get a job and learn what life is really like. Going to university? Okay, we’ll pay for that if we can, but then you have to get out, get a job and learn what life is really like.

A different, but equally vital community.

So, finish high school, go to university, get a job, get married, have kids, save for retirement, retire and die. That is the path, there is no other. Oh, don’t forget to follow your passion somewhere in there.
Whew! Almost forgot the passion part.

We put limits on what a person can do/be by creating boxes to tick, papers to get and ways to fit in. Then we don’t acknowledge how this challenges the community’s ability to thrive.

Yet, our history is ripe with examples of people who ditched the boxes, ignored the papers, didn’t fit in and were the greatest minds of their time. These are the people that moved our society forward in leaps while all the paper-holding,  box –tickers plodded along barely noticing the changes taking place around them until they became the marginalized by some new world order.

It is irrational this society we’ve created where the best hunter (aka rich guy) refuses to share with his community because they didn’t work as hard as he did. We have become selfish, short-sighted Lone Wolves. No wonder we go nuts during full moons (yes, that’s documented). We need to howl in hopes of hearing another Lone Wolf and thereby feeling community. Because we are pack animals. Lone wolves mostly starve.

In case you haven’t heard, it takes a whole community to raise a child. I would add that it takes a whole community to allow each member to thrive and it takes each member thriving to make a whole community.

― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most (hockey) coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”

Yet another kind of vital community.