“NOBODY’S got a sense of community anymore. . . . they all know more about the Simpsons neighbours than they do about their own. Nobody knows their corner grocer anymore because they all shop at those giant corporate warehouse superstores that’ve driven the family-owned corner grocery stores out of business.”
– Tim Brown, Pulpspotting
“Your farm neighbour’s more important than your neighbour’s farm.”
– Bumper sticker, circa 1985
Community is a word used often, in a variety of different contexts, with a lot of different meanings.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
As a refugee from Toronto, I’ve lived in the West, mostly Saskatchewan, since 1971.
I’ve learned that there are two bibles here. One is the Holy Scriptures of the Christian faith; the other, the Canadian Wheat Board permit book. Both of those books have a significant impact.
If you doubt that, think of times when people had zero quota on a given rail line. Nobody could deliver grain. Nobody had any money coming in. Nobody got paid.
And the corner grocer, whom you had probably known for years, simply extended credit. She or he knew you couldn’t pay even if you wanted to. So the drawer below the till was full of those books, one per family, where you signed for what you bought while promising to pay as soon as you had some money.
I understand the kind of mutual dependency those books represent.
Community doesn’t happen because people live in the same geographic area. It is more than just taking up a collection or having a benefit dance for the folks two quarters over or two blocks over who lost everything when their home burned down.
Community is something people build by working together on projects important to all. In the process, they share who they are – joys and sorrows, hopes and fears – and build inter-dependence and trust. Community happens when people care for each other right from the marrow of their bones.
Real community can be fragile and has to be nurtured continually. That’s not easy in an age when people are so deeply involved in their own cares that they cannot see beyond their own fences.
It is not easy in a time characterized by the creeping, dare I say galloping, blight of individualism – that rudely self-centred, antisocial notion that “I” am more important that everyone else around me, even the community itself.
The common law protection of the individual from the community, strengthened earlier in John Diefenbaker’s Canadian Bill of Rights, has become the tyranny of the individual over the community.
That nurturing is not easy when people are seduced by the lower prices of giant corporate warehouse superstores, and choose to shop there. Such things ultimately destroy community.
There is a price attached to community, measured in time, money and energy. If we cannot or will not pay that price, we will pay the much higher price of isolation and vulnerability.
Rob Brown is a United Church minister now engaged in graduate studies on ethics. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
