Communities in Crisis

When a tropical storm hits your area, heavy rain descending like condemnation from above, and roads start to flood, one gets a glimpse of what life was like when everything was more local. The rest of the world fades into the background in a crisis, and I’m not convinced that is regrettable.

Nowadays, we tend to spend a lot of our energy on things beyond our control, and which don’t affect our lives — or wouldn’t, if we weren’t aware of them. This keeps all of us in a state of constant stress, as if always under a state of alarm. Manufactured outrage keeps people incapable of being calm. How can they relax when Governor Y said X… on the other side of the country? Of course there’s a duty to be informed, but being constantly alerted to things that don’t affect us can be harmful—especially if it’s an unabating state. A 24/7 release of adrenaline cannot be what we were made for, physically or spiritually.

The most cliché example would be a stereotypical young man in his 20s who is still living with his parents, full of rage about events around the world, but oblivious to the happenings in his neighborhood or in his home—for he never leaves his computer desk. It is the proximal crises that he has the most obligation to respond to, but he can’t even see those. He’s blinded by misdirected attention.

We only have so much time to give, only so much attention, and so much emotional energy. Therefore, we must be selective about what we dedicate ourselves to.

It’s easier to focus on battles afar because they demand less from us, precisely because they don’t affect us in a tangible way. Our communities—where we live—that’s another matter. The people whom we know and like will hear our opinions and make judgments, some of them negative. Perhaps we don’t really want to know that our neighbor is in favor of an abortion-till-birth bill. But this is also where cultural change takes place, and where networks form that can protect people from the chaos that is spreading throughout the West. School boards, mayors, commissioners, and even neighborhood associations can affect people in the real world, creating positive changes and defenses against entropy.

We don’t need to be blind to what’s going on in the rest of the nation, but we cannot sacrifice the local in exchange for it. Even in terms of our souls, few would argue that the constant immersion in faraway battles is good for us spiritually. One way that it affects us is by clouding our vision of the good. At the national or even global level, we are likely to hear only about negative news, whereas engagement in local culture reminds us why we care at all—those couples still getting married, babies getting baptized, neighbors who help one another in times of difficulty. Wholesome communities take effort to build and to sustain. They’re worth the toil, for they are the only counterweight to large-scale cultural collapse.

As families become more fractured, children lack the guidance of two-parent homes, and the Church is displaced from its rightful spot in society, a cultural descent is inevitable. Christocentric communities can protect and defend against the degenerate wave that grips the nation, and they can band together to create a parallel economy that lives distinct from the secular world when it becomes necessary to do so. It’s too late to build such communities in a crisis, so begin now.