Good morning!
This is the weekly DKos Asheville open thread where we try to get together every Saturday morning around eleven, and then drift in and out throughout the day. We hope this group serves to reinvigorate us locally and regionally here on Daily Kos, building on the sense of community that's grown through our online engagement. DKos Asheville can give us all a better sense of connection, a better understanding of who these people are that we stand with, work with, and share with in the political process. We hope, through this community, that we can do a better job of leveraging our orange passion for progressive politics to help elect more and better Democrats.
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This morning I was thinking about small local communities again. The specific group that I was thinking about is what is usually referred to as an intentional community. The word "intentional" in this context refers to the intention of the group's members to live together in community, sharing a common building or a common piece of land. But that phrase "intentional community" means much more than that.
In the case of the group that I was thinking of, the intent has become one of sharing and supporting. The common aspirations and ideals that led to our coming together have found expression in our sharing with and support of each other, regardless of the fact that we have yet to purchase land or even reach agreement on details related to building on such land. And it is this spirit of community that has been one of the most remarkable outcomes of the project.
Of course, this spirit of community need not be limited to groups of folks who want to share living space. Local groups can form around sharing food and skills, collaborating on child care, being supportive of each other spiritually, and in many other ways.
Here on Daily Kos we often talk about getting out from under the control of large multinational corporations. We talk about the damage done by big banks, big-box stores, big-ag, fast-food chains, etc. One way to begin changing our world away from the dominance of the 1%, is to begin changing our individual lives in such a way that we look to form local communities of people as alternative culture, in whatever forms those groups may take.
So, starting with, for instance, commonly held views as to the dangers inherent in the predominant culture, as groups meet and discuss and share, the relationships between these individuals will grow and deepen, and they can begin finding ways to work together, changing fundamentally the way that we live in society. This fundamental change is away from a paradigm of the individual consumer who purchases good and services, and toward a relationship with the world around us based on "we" as the starting point.
While it is important to work on national and state levels to enact legislation that will lead to a more just world socially and economically, it is also important, perhaps more important, that we endeavor to change our world on a micro scale as well; in small communities of people working together, sharing, supporting, nurturing.
And this requires a willingness to open. Our culture has taught us to fear, to protect ourselves against others, to close down, to raise defenses. But building community means that we have to open ourselves to others, to be willing to listen, to question our tendencies to react against in our own perceived self-interests; to fundamentally change our relationship with the world around us from "me" to "we".
It is, in my view, at the heart of the progressive movement; building a more socially, economically, and environmentally just world is about "us", all of us. It is about community; communities of all sizes and types. Breaking the power of the oligarchy and corporatocracy begins with our efforts locally to change ourselves and the way we live "intentionally" in community.
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Enjoy your day!