Community Across Difference
Preserving and building the relationships we need
A few days ago I was in a small circle of men, and we had just heard a few talks. We were discussing what we’d been listening to, including an excellent talk about masculinity and how it doesn’t need to fit one “bro” mold. The speaker wove stories of his father together with quotes from bell hooks and others to tell us how freeing it was to be raised outside the confines of a traditional and limited masculinity. It was a delight to hear, especially in an audience composed 80% of men, and it was doubly delightful to see most of the men nod along, hearing the message from a messenger they could listen to. But, then, a man came over and gave his take on the talk, which amounted to the idea that masculinity was in short supply these days. Asked to expand a little on his opinion, he quickly let it be known that there’s a chemical in the water that is de-masculinizing us. They know because the chemical does that to frogs, he said. It’s one thing Alex Jones (a man who has been sued to the end of the Earth for saying Sandy Hook was a conspiracy) is right about, he said.
I left the conversation right around then, but not before seeing the other guys in the circle roll their eyes. Not much later I was conversing again with a friend, who had also left that little circle when the conspiracy theorist reared his head. One thing to know is that this whole experience, from the talk to the conversation, took place at a slightly unusual event this past weekend. It was a summer camp reunion, a gathering of people who had attended and worked at this camp over the past few decades. Many of us had done both, becoming counselors after being campers as kids. So as I talked to my friend we both found ourselves expressing a strange gratitude, a gratitude that should maybe be more familiar.
We both found ourselves glad to be in a place where one guy who clearly gets his information from some terrible sources can’t disrupt the community, where people who know him better can push back but where others can just shrug him off and keep it moving. We were glad to be in a place where a community has held strong for decades and cannot be shaken. And, as in any long-term community, that means holding disagreement and difference and learning how to make things work regardless. It’s not always pretty, but the result is beautiful. In that specific camp community the result is hundreds of people coming together across generations to support a place where kids can grow and where adults can nurture relationships built in their childhoods.
One testament to the power of this specific community was the way people came to the reunion with wives, partners, kids, and even parents. I had conversation after conservation with people I hadn’t seen in ten or even fifteen years, in addition to talking to people I’ve kept up with or seen more recently, and in each case we settled right back into the flow, right back into camaraderie and friendship. The whole experience spoke of the power of community that extends across time, resilient in this changing world. I won’t bore you with the story of my great uncle working in the summer camp industry, and how my cousins and brother and I went to and worked at that same camp, but I will say that place changed my life. It’s old school, focused on character development and maintaining its Luddism as the society surrounding it cares more and more about technology, phones, social media and the temptations of modernity.
Looking back on the last few days it’s mildly alarming how unusual this all feels. So many communities have been weakened, so many of us are so transient these days, and holding political difference has become increasingly untenable. Now you and I know that maintaining relationships with people who don’t think you or I have a right to exist is not something we’d ask anyone to engage in, and with the right moving further and further right that is of course an eminently real concern. But for others we disagree with, who hopefully fall far short of that, there has still been a confounding normalization of cutting people off as political practice. And that is, in part, because so many of us think of relationships primarily as something that happens between two individuals, and not something that happens in community.
For most of human history, relationships were not things that could be ended, by and large. You existed in community with people you didn’t like, whether you liked it or not, because no one was going anywhere. And I’m not saying that’s unequivocally a good thing, but I am saying that if we don’t develop conflict resolution skills and the ability to hold people’s flaws and mistakes with grace, what little community we do have will inevitably disintegrate. We need to have the capacity to sit with people we disagree with, people who have hurt us, and people we’ve hurt. For some of you, this is maybe the most intuitive comment you’ve seen in a while, for others it might be something to wrestle with. And that’s okay, I’m someone who wishes this was all intuitive for me, but who instead has a whole lot to learn here.
I’ve written more than I can recall about building community, organizing, fighting the systems that destroy communities, and more. But what I’ve sometimes missed in all that is how preserving the community we do have is just as important as building anew. We have more creation, more construction to do than is ideal, but institutions like schools and places of worship and weird summer camps and our neighborhoods foster communal bonds, and our work there is less to create and more to preserve. That preservation takes systemic work, because it is ultimately systems of extraction and profit-seeking that want to carve communities up and weaken them. But preservation also takes person-to-person work, the maintenance of bonds, and the willingness to hold difficult people and relationships inside our communities rather than casting them out.
In this society we are so deeply trained to think that people who violate norms should be removed from society as punishment. That is the first resort, when it should be the very last. Sometimes it may be necessary, but the bonds formed by repair and accountability for harm create a network that is so much stronger than a community formed only by untested connections. In actively working on relationships, in working on the capacity to hold one another in our imperfections over years and years, we build and preserve an infinitely deeper capacity for the conflict that is inevitable in life, let alone for the political battles that we’re up against now, and the ones we’re certain to face in the future.
I’m not saying this from a place of expertise, just from a place of my admittedly limited experience. So, in the spirit of this piece, I’ll respect your disagreement and I hope to learn from it. Regardless of whether or not we disagree, I hope you have a robust community, or multiple, in your life where people can be imperfect and be themselves and continue to be welcomed as integral members. Maybe in your neighborhood that isn’t even a thought, because of course no one is excluded unless they egregiously cross hard lines. Or maybe it’s the opposite, and you feel your community is fragile and in need of strengthening. Whatever the case, I hope you have or develop places and people you can always return to, and be safe with, where hands are reached out to help and to welcome, and that your hand is among them.
My reaction as a woman is to wish that the guy promoting conspiracy theories had gotten at least a little push back in front of the large group, because silence implies complicity. The silent eye rolls he did not see may allow him and those who agree with him to continue to believe that their peers agree with them, which isn't true.
The reason that this makes me uncomfortable is that I suspect that your experience around this circle would not have been much different had the gentleman made a disparaging comment about women.
Women have been begging the "good guys" to stand up to the creeps in real time when they cat call us or tell sexist jokes in men-only spaces or observe workplace harassments and/or discrimination. We certainly need more than a "not all men" approach to the epidemic of domestic violence against women and children.
We need to acknowledge that men can be the most effective force to make lasting changes to male culture. I would argue that men are the *only* ones who can permanently change male culture. Which is why I find it difficult to hear stories of the self-proclaimed "good guys" remaining silent instead of calling other men to a higher standard.
Excellent post, modern man as respectful with open hand and mind.