Community may become increasingly important in the days ahead
Venezuela was once the wealthiest nation in South America. Now, its citizens are fleeing on foot thanks to corrupt policy and leadership. While we hope what happened there does not happen here, I’m reminded from good friends who came here from Venezuela and who still have family there how important local community became to survival during shortages and hyperinflation.
Several months ago I’d written about the importance of developing good relationships with neighbors, particularly when one or two of them might even prove to be challenging. As time has progressed, I’m increasingly sensing the importance of developing community ties beyond the family, friends, and neighbors we already have. I believe we are going to be depending upon one another more than before for both skills and resources.
An example of this: I was on a phone thread recently with about 16 people and there was a request for an over the counter therapeutic that’s been effective in treating covid. The patient was already in a hospital and once that happens, in this hospital in particular, they’re not expected to come out alive. The requested anti-viral was secured. The attending physician acknowledged that the covid patient was not responding to the treatments the hospital was administering, and the wife of the patient begged that she be allowed to give her husband the therapeutic. The doctor consented, but made her swear not to tell a soul so that she, the doctor, would not lose her license.
Let’s pause for a second. What kind of universe are we living in? An expensive, ineffective, kidney-damaging drug is administered without a second thought by the hospital, but an over the counter treatment which will potentially save someone’s life (and that’s handed out standard in refugee packets upon their admittance to our country – yes, you heard that correctly, non-citizens get it free and easy as candy) has to be smuggled in under oath of secrecy?
So this is the world we presently find ourselves in. We are also enmeshed in an economy where prices are climbing steadily and the dollar is not stretching as far as it used to. Items that were once easy to secure are suddenly no longer on the shelves. You click to add something to your cart on the internet and receive a message that it’s back ordered – indefinitely. In essence, things we took for granted two years ago are no longer a sure bet. Systems we relied on to have integrity and our best interest in mind we now question. The world has shifted in many ways to become unrecognizable – and in a very short time.
The why of community and networking is evident. The food system, the medical system, the education system, the political system – they’re all in disarray. Covid revealed how centralized and how vulnerable our food system is. More and more people are raising their own backyard chickens. Many people are leaving the city and even the suburbs and looking to rent or purchase land. I’ve lost track of the number of people I know – or I’ve met – in the last year, who’ve gotten out.
How do you forge mutually beneficial connections for the days ahead?
Developing community doesn’t generally happen instantly. Nor can it be forced. It takes time. Sometimes the workplace environment is wonderful for this and sometimes it is actually detrimental. So how do you go about networking?
As I reflected on life the last few years it left me dazzled how my community network has grown exponentially. Not only that, but the value of these relationships can’t be underestimated. Here are some ideas to consider as you look to get more connected with like-minded individuals:
Church (individual churches but the church as a whole). Finding a good church is vital for your spiritual well-being, but it also plays a foundational role in your emotional and sometimes physical well-being as well. Our little country church supports its members in prayer and with counsel, and through dozens of practical means, whether it’s filling up someone’s fuel tank when they can’t afford it or bringing meals to families during sickness or new babies or helping them write out a budget or giving an elderly widow rides to her doctor’s appointments. We are also blessed to have more than one master carpenter and a roofer and several in construction and mechanics, plus ladies with all kinds of expertise in nursing and forgotten life skills. Someone found out a member and his expectant wife needed a room redone in their home and a team from the church had the demolition, dry walling, and flooring installed before they could blink.
Back in the day, the church was the center of the community. It wasn’t unusual for the structure itself to serve as both the school and the community meeting house. With rare exception, all the townspeople attended. As communities grew larger and diversified, more denominations appeared. Where my father-in-law grew up in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania, to this day when you drive up, about every other corner of this small town there’s a church. There’s the Byzantine Catholic, the Ukrainian Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox, the Lutheran, the Episcopal, and so on.Every one of these dazzling, ornate churches was constructed by different immigrant groups coming from Europe.
Among the settlers, who really laid the foundation for our country as we know it, they risked all they had and more often than not buried children on the frontier. You had the Quakers with their meeting houses and the German Anabaptists and the Spanish mission.it was the same thing: among the first structures in a town would be their meeting house, and that formed the center of community.
If you’re someone who’s had a bad experience with church and wrote it off, that’s very sad. You’re joining a long line of people. But the reality is, the church is like any family. People are imperfect. Leadership can get it wrong. And very unfortunately, some churches are even infiltrated by really evil people who use it as a cover to hide sinister practices.
The point is this: take the time to discover a good church with people who are seeking truth. I cannot underestimate the benefits of being involved with a healthy, sound church.
Grassroots political movements. When Pennsylvania shut down under mandate of our governor in 2020, it wreaked havoc on small business owners, many of whom had to shut their doors after generations of service. The restaurant industry was especially hard hit, and when they were told they were permitted only to open at 25% capacity, what that meant was that only a fraction of the staff was needed; waitresses suddenly could no longer pay their bills.
A movement started in South Central Pennsylvania to help these small businesses and to educate the public as to their rights. For example, most people, including business owners, did not know that a mandate is not a law. So when the state came in and sought to shut down the little guy because he wasn’t following the mandate, this grassroots group pooled their funds to hire an attorney to represent them. When the restaurants refused to obey the mandates, the state slapped them with a fine. The owner, if he or she refused to pay it, would find big brother back a second time to intimidate, but this time the state would lower the fine. Each and every time the restaurant owner resisted to the point that a court appearance was necessary, the charges and fines were dropped by the state. Why? Because the state knew the mandate had no legal backing and it would get tossed out in court.
There are people in office who love power and don’t give a rip about the ordinary, law-abiding citizen, and they’re perfectly content to ruin your lives all while collecting a salary from your tax dollars.
If you want to change this, you need to get involved. Voting is a starting place. But decent people who just want to live quiet lives in dignity have been absent to the game, while the other side has the political reps by the throat. Start attending your local school board meetings, even if you don’t have kids who attend public school. See how your tax dollars are being spent. Find out what local seats are open.
I didn’t want to get involved politically but what am I going to tell my kids some day? That I sat back and hoped someone else would do the hard things? There are empty chairman and chairwoman seats available all over the state. This is how you vet constitutionally conservative candidates and weed out the RINOS. There were no empty seats in my voting precinct, but there was an opening for inspector of elections. I found out the night before, ran as a write-in candidate, and won.
The grassroots political groups provide a network of like-minded people who may have access to resources that provide help that might be life and death. The opening example of a wife acquiring and then smuggling a therapeutic into a hospital to save the life of her husband floundering under hospital protocol is one example. Legal counsel for employees slapped with jab mandates has been another provision. Sometimes too, if you work in a place where you’re surrounded by people with polar opposite worldviews than you, just having a support network of fellow patriots is huge to your mental health.
Homeschool communities and co-ops. Again, this is another avenue that opened unprecedented doors for me personally. The growing homeschool community is something I’m in awe of. It’s mushrooming. And while it was enormously helpful for my sanity in the early days of my homeschool experience, it has also connected me with nurses and military families and professionals of all kinds.Hearing insights from nurses and military personnel has proved to be very enlightening, since if you listen to the news, you get a very one-sided, narrow account of how things are in the world.
The homeschool community is also very ethnically diverse where I am, and it has been interesting to hear firsthand, for example, from a woman whose family emigrated here from Uruguay and who grew up in New York City, how much certain minority groups distrust the medical community because of things that were done to them. In fact, she had a story of helping with FEMA to get vaccines available to locals in the city, and she said people walked by their tent all day long and hurled insults at them while the volunteers twiddled their thumbs. This is stuff the newspapers don’t report, and I find it fascinating what’s going on behind the narrative we’re handed by the media about minorities not having access to certain things, when the reality is they don’t trust the medical community because of incidents such as the Tuskegee syphilis injections and clandestine experimental measles vaccines being administered on Hispanic and African American babies in Los Angeles as late as the 1990s.
(Side note: how many people realize that the CDC was complicit with UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal in covering up the cholera they brought to Haiti in 2010, which killed an estimated 7,500 people?)
Neighbors. What if you don’t know your neighbors? Well, you can do what we did, and that’s host a drop-in. Or, do them a favor if you see an opportunity, such as shoveling their walks. Bring them cookies at Christmas.
Moms groups. Where we live in Pennsylvania there is no end to the number of mom’s groups out there. They’re advertised in the local merchandiser and on social media, and a quick internet search will bring up several options. This is another potential networking group of people in a similar station in life as you might be.
Bible studies/prayer groups. If you’re not sure about joining a church or if you want to get involved in a small group setting, a bible study or prayer group is another great option to connect with caring people of faith.
Finally, sports, sportsmen clubs, fitness groups, and scouts are other potential avenues of connecting with other individuals and potentially forging relationships.
What have I left out? How are you connecting with like-minded individuals to prepare for potential interruptions in the supply chain or to normalcy in general?
Sources: North American Churches: from chapels to cathedrals
UN Should Get Rid of Cholera Epidemic That It Brought to Haiti