Discuss: Where Have All the Joiners Gone?

Bill McKibben describes our oil-powered isolation well.  But he doesn’t mention the computer (and coal) powered neighborliness that allows me to do what I am doing right now, connect with countless strangers all over the world.  It’s not the same, this digital neighborliness, bodiless, opportunistic, and inconstant, but maybe it can help us find the other kind again, too.  What I learned years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in North Carolina is that neighbors come together when there is need.  One small hope that we might take about the future is that as self-sufficiency comes to a close, need will bring neighbors together again. The cup of sugar is waiting.

This article rang very deeply in me. Perhaps one of the deepest concerns I have about my own life and that of the communities around me here in Japan, especially since I moved to this ghost town a year and a half ago and have not met a single local person yet. Most days I exist on the internet when I am not working, otherwise I would have no one to communicate with. It is the very desire to connect through the internet that reveals our need for one another and just how far we have all separated ourselves from the power of a casual greeting or an outreaching hand. Maybe that is why places like Nigeria are considered by the UN to be the “happiest” places in the world, whereas many of the industrialized countries are distinctly sullen.

I live in a rural area. I’ve watched 100’s of families lose their farms. The politicians might cry out for the “family” farmers, but the subsidies go to the big guys. The other day I went to the big city. I was shocked at how many stores where owned by corporations. I grabbed on to the american dream only to watch it go up in a smoke called “economic growth”. I’m tired of the lies.

I was just thinking about this topic the other day! I am actually selling my house so that I can reconnect with society. The time that I don’t spend on yard or going from room to room enjoying my vast expanse of privacy I can now use to participate and interact in the community like I used to when I was younger. Babies who don’t recieve enough interaction with others, especially direct touch, suffer from what is called failure to thrive and suffer mentally as well as physically.I think as a society, we have become that failure to thrive baby and it’s time to get back in ‘touch’ with our fellow humans so that we may continue to grow and thrive.

Like Jean Cheney, I lived through the aftermath of Hugo. It’s a shame that disaster has to strike before we can take the time for our neighbors.The next couple of years of economic chaos are going to be a golden opportunity for us to show our best side to the world....or our worst.

Excellent piece. The “joiner” notion fits in to that Atlantic article of several years past that noted the causality between our society’s general decline and the decline in bowling leagues.

Same at the backyard fence. Used to chat all the time with the neighbors. New neighbors arrived. They cocoon, and so we talk a lot less; about the weather, although not climate change.

I vividly recall my grandparents, northern Wisconsin dairy farmers ekking out a living with 12 cows and 200 acres of rocky, glacial land. No electricity into the early 1950s, no phone, wood stove for heat. Their neighbors were a mile or so away in either direction, and yet everybody knew everybody and cooperated. They all belonged to the Grange. They looked after farms down the road when someone got ill. It didn’t seem noble, either, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

Ah, but we’ll be there again shortly.

Nonindependence - I love it! I live in a rural area and, because of some life experiences that nearly moved me to the margins of society, I’ve spent some time trying to pay attention to the community that exists around me and reconnect. What I’ve discovered is that community is still there, but it tends to lie dormant until the ground is tended. We have to act (say hello, extend invitations, accept help, join in), we have to pay attention (see our neighbors, learn when to step in, to offer, to share). We have to remember local stories of noninterdepence, think about what made those stories possible and act as if it mattered.

Irony of ironies: as technology “liberates” us to communicate instantly with supposedly anyone on the globe, U.S. society seems to increasing be made of silos. We drive, not walk, and therefore don’t talk with others, we accept gated communities, and yes, we rush about.  On my little three block street, the 12 high schoolers attend 8 different high schools. The commons still needs to be touchable, not only digital. So stopping, hearing the quiet, hearing one’s breath, taking in another face and voice and feelings is so precious.

Bill McKibben always makes a lot of sense. The gulf between my childhood in small town, front porch Illinois and most of the rest of my life in air-conditioned Sacramento or other crowded North California environs, was huge.  Thankfully, rural Mendocino county has woken up to exactly what McKibben advocates.  And it’s spreading...because it has to.