A Winter in Isolation
Building community wherever we are.
I spent this past winter without community, in a new place for the first time in a decade. After nearly ten years in New York I found myself in my partner’s Montana hometown, distant from family, far from the places I’ve spent my life, and further from the communities I’ve been a part of. The only people I knew in this town of a couple thousand, to start, were my partner’s parents and my partner. We spent the winter in a two-room house, which happened to be missing a door on the bedroom, and I found a type of isolation I’ve never known before. In that isolation I accidentally learned more about what I want in this life.
In a small town, meeting people takes a little time. At least, that was my experience. But a great book club with a handful of scattered lefties allowed us to being getting to know some truly wonderful people right off the bat. Last week I wrote a little about a farmer and a worker at the bookstore that hosted the club, and how these folks became our friends over the course of the winter and into the spring. The farmer and his wife now want to turn part of their property into a community garden, and the bookstore worker and his girlfriend let us live with them when we had to leave our little house without a bedroom door.
But these great people, my partner’s parents, and a handful of others formed only a loose patchwork of relationships. When we think about community, most of us consider it a more comprehensive fabric, not just a series of weakly connected individuals and relationships. I’ve had multiple experiences of being more plugged into a place, more connected to numerous people in my neighborhood or borough or city, who are themselves intricately connected to one another, and I know how that feels. It feels supportive, strong, and reliable. And this past winter I was remarkably far from those past communal experiences. More than an island I was a raft, disconnected, precarious, cut off.
I was and am fortunate to have a partner who is both immensely supportive and who was born and raised in that town. But even then we ran into the way modern life erodes community. Most of my partner’s childhood friends have left increasingly conservative rural Montana for college towns, big cities, or other countries. So she too was confronted with isolation, and we found ourselves living largely on our own through a cold winter in a small town.
The effects of this existence without community have been normalized to a remarkable degree. To exist in relative aloneness, as an individual or as a nuclear family, is typical now, although my understanding is that many of our ancestors wouldn’t even be able to comprehend this way of life. People move to cities where they know nobody, and people who have been settled in an area for years often traverse to work and back home without forming meaningful connections, and without being a part of the fabric of their community. This is part of the life that capitalism has created for far too many people. Work takes precedence, suburbs allow for further alienation, and the institutions and physical infrastructure that used to bring us all together have been dismantled or lapsed into decay.
Even in rural Montana I saw that to be the case far more often than I had expected. Countless retirees and remote workers have flooded the zone, making housing prices skyrocket and suburbifying much of this naturally gorgeous region. People drive everywhere and even many of those who are more deeply rooted in the area have had to move, or have seen institutions disappear during their lifetimes. Churches are still powerful anchors, but outside of them it can be extremely hard to find places to come together and be a part of communal life. Some fraternal organizations provide hubs to older and wealthier people, and the bars haven’t gone anywhere. The library is a core resource and gathering place, and the one bookstore in the area was wonderful. But like so much of America a diverse array of institutions have been whittled down. And while community still exists it’s more fractured, harder for many people to access, and weaker in numerous ways. Those who don’t conform to certain, mostly conservative, norms can find themselves particularly unable to access communal life.
This all means people have trouble resisting rising rents, rising home prices, and other unwelcome changes. That’s true just about everywhere, and the decline of unions, the rise of neoliberalism, and the weakening of our communities all go together. But it was my first time being so disconnected from a network of support, and my first time wanting to find my place in a community and really struggling to do so. Living in New York City for my adult life has, I know, spoiled me in many ways. For years I’ve used my platforms and my writing to encourage people to plug into organizing, and I would sometimes get responses like “There’s no way to do that where I live, there’s no infrastructure.” I would never know how to respond in those instances. Telling someone to start from scratch, to find people where there may be no one to find, never felt like a viable answer.
But then I met people starting from scratch. This past winter I met the man running a book club who was deliberately trying to bring the leftists in his area together. When my partner and I proposed going to a local diner with the book club one night, he excitedly agreed, and all of us wound up talking about how we could get organized. I met the couple trying to turn part of their farm into a garden where community members could come grow their own food and talk about building something in the region. I met the older couple trading their eggs and produce to their neighbors and building a little group of people who participate in a solidarity economy, whether they knew it or not. I was, and am, just a transient in these areas, for now. But I saw seeds planted, and helped to plant a couple myself. Across America people are seeing the cost of housing, the cost of food, and the cost of climate inaction. And they’re responding by trying to build organizations right where they are, with whichever neighbors are open-minded to taking action.
The truth is that we have to build organizations everywhere, and we have to build community everywhere. Even in places where there are some organizing structures and great community groups in place, the existing infrastructure for grassroots power is usually still in its infancy. That is simply the reality of the U.S. left after the Reagan years, neoliberalism, the decline of communal institutions, and more. Many of our communities have been decimated and continue to disintegrate. That is our reality, and acknowledging it is the first step in turning these trends around.
It’s strange to have to build things that our ancestors took for granted. It’s strange to have to relearn a relationship with the natural world that our ancestors simply received from their ancestors and so on and so forth. It’s strange to have to deliberately build community in ways that past generations may have taken for granted. Yet this is our job today in many ways; capitalism has decimated communal institutions and the fabric of neighborhoods and cities and familial relationships, much as it’s decimated our relationship to the land and other species. This is not to say we are simply trying to recreate the past, but rather that we have so much to bring from the past into the present.
We have ancestral relationships with nature to relearn and incorporate into our reality. We have old ways of forming communities and preserving them to bring into the way we live now. We have ancient ways of treating the land itself, ways of communal stewardship to reintroduce into society. And while fascists hearken back to the past in order to pretend there’s an old glory to rekindle, that’s just empty gesturing in an effort to create a more oppressive and regressive society. The left, on the other hand, has to be honest and intentional and actually try to resuscitate some of the ancient ways of being, of living, of sharing. Our approach can’t pretend nothing has changed, or claim that our greatest days are behind us, but instead has to integrate healthy old ways into the present alongside notions of worker power, direct democracy, communalism and more.
My partner and I talk and think often about the tenant union in Bozeman, Montana. The average house in Bozeman now sells for nearly 1 million dollars and one of the ways people have responded is by building a powerful tenant union. One of the union’s founders is now mayor, the city effectively banned most Aribnbs, and they’re reportedly just getting started. The tenants in Bozeman learned a lot from the tenants building power in Kansas City, and neither city likely comes to mind when you think of progressive powerhouses. But in both cases people looked around and saw that the infrastructure, the organization, the answers they needed weren’t there, so they set out to build them. Now both unions are remarkably powerful and are starting to reshape their cities. As the American proverb goes, “If you build it they will come.” And when it comes to housing costs, people will certainly flock to you if you start to present a credible solution to their massive problem.
We have to remember that people are only able to come when others start to build. Those who create, who take a leap, who take the first step in starting to organize the institutions needed to confront the problems we face are heroes. Most will never be recognized, tenant organizers and community organizers and union organizers will rarely be met with any sort of fame or a big payout, but they are the pillars holding up our future nonetheless. And the reward that has been so powerful, for me, is being deeply embedded in a strong community. The feeling and experience that I’ve been fortunate enough to have, of moving to a new place many years ago, and, in time, walking down the block in New York City and knowing my neighbors, being unable to go out without seeing friends and fellow organizers and community members is a wonderful, invaluable thing. Not to mention the rewards we could all reap in transforming our neighborhoods and cities and this country if we build and persist and learn and improve and create an unstoppable movement over time.
To some of you community might just be second nature, but so many people have been displaced from so many towns and neighborhoods, while others have moved because of work or family or other circumstances, that the most simple and profound joy of being a real member of a strong and active community is more and more elusive. It’s not only up to us to change that, up to us to rebuild and build anew the organizations and communal institutions we need, it’s also one of the most rewarding endeavors we could possibly embark on. After a winter of isolation I emerged more certain than ever that building and strengthening a community alongside my neighbors is where I hope to devote much of my life’s energy. And I hope you’re drawn to do the same.
Beautiful, thank you. Loneliness is such a scourge these days. Community is the only way forward.
Once again, your experiences mirror my own, but you are able to articulate your thoughts in a way that I can't. Your words are very much appreciated.