Hurricane Ike was my first major hurricane. Being from Illinois (and living my first 47 years north of the Mason Dixon line, far from the Gulf of Mexico), I had little idea of what to expect beyond prime-time news clips.
Much of the actual event was exactly as I had seen on CNN for years: the relentless wind, of course, and the sideways, beating rain was just as predicted. I expected the power to go out (and it did), the humidity to be unbearable (and it was) and the ice to be worth more than gold (it came close).
What I didn't expect was the opportunity Ike gave me to get to know my neighbors.
Of course, I'd met most of them before, but there was never much to talk about. Things were relatively good in our neighborhood, and no big problems to fix, so why not just go inside to our own homes and watch a little cable TV?
But with no power, and broken trees everywhere, suddenly, there was a subject for ongoing conversation (and little else to distract it). Most was the typical interaction that occurs between survivors: where did you find a generator? How long did you wait to get gas? Did you see the electric company people come around this block yet? Did you see the roof damage on the house down the street?
We then moved quickly to the big issues that we shared as a neighborhood: a collective frustration with the power company, the forecasters, and life on the Gulf in general (especially as many of us were transplanted northerners who were merely tolerating Houston as the place where we made our money -- certainly not our "home"). And our collective complaining (along with our very uncomfortable houses) kept us out on the street and in conversation.
Yet, something else happened. Unable to create much change, we started enjoying each others company and looking for opportunities to connect -- using the problem as cheap excuse to interact, really. We had set up a large dinner party a few blocks up -- in one of the very few houses that had electricity restored quickly (lesson 1 in hurricane land: live close enough to a medical facility to be part of their grid). By the second week we had well over fifty people crammed together, sharing burgers, hot dogs, pizza, and whatever else could be mustered up from the limited supplies. Though I was delighted to get my electricity back by day 9, I did miss these nightly block parties (which we kept participating in -- as one of the "cooking" houses that had refrigeration and working appliances -- until day 13 when just about everyone had power).
The storm is a distant memory. The branches have all been picked up, trees have been replanted, roofs fixed. But even now, the neighborhood feels a little friendlier. The interaction has, of course, lessened, but it has not abated. People now stand out in their driveways to have conversations with their neighbors a little bit more often than they did before, wave to others a bit more, and watch out for the other a bit more.
Ever notice how "community" and "communication" have the same set of root words to express their concepts? Both words rely upon the "com" root which denotes "with" or "together" and "mun" which means "share." Community and communication are, quite literally, twin concepts with the same semiotic DNA; both are based upon the notion of "sharing together."
Community is truly dependent on communication and without it, much of community is unable to operate. Although we place a great deal (too much, perhaps) of emphasis on political leadership, the truth is that there's not much to lead without needs, interests, ideas, or desires being shared across all parties.
My hope is that this blog can help explore the many ways in which communication enhances community. I hope to write about a wide range of communication issues that impact community organizing, community visioning, community planning, and community change.
That last term, while very popular in social problem rhetoric, is for me the largest "problem" in our approach to community development. We're great at finding problems as the focus of our communication. Like in my experience with Ike, we use all that is wrong or unwanted in our experience as the motivation to communicate. Like they say -- misery loves company. And we are miserable -- too many of our neighborhood conversations are full of crime, substance abuse, teen delinquency, noisy neighbors, perverts, predators, and the unwanted.
Granted, these problems are real, but the satisfaction in our communication has little at all to do with the problem. Most who join social causes actually stay -- and work -- for the social satisfaction of interacting with others; it is the friendships and the camaraderie that we most adore.
But there's a deeper concern here for me, and that is the limited ability that problem-based talk has in actually helping make a better place to live. In the case of Ike, all our complaining did nothing to get our power back on any faster, or get the supplies we all needed back in the grocery stores and gas stations.
The issue surrounds our focus. When the majority of our communication focuses on the unwanted, there is little energy available to imagine the wanted. What kind of community do we want to live in? Surely, it is more than a community without crime, without substance abuse, without poverty, without noisy neighbors and all the rest.
What "problem" talk does, ultimately, is keep us focused on solutions rather than creations. We start making programs that solve the problem: a community watch program, a community alert system, a community
In fact, those problems, rather than serving as the focus of our energy, should inspire us to think and talk about what we'd like to be a community with. In other words, what is it that we envision filling our spaces and places, grabbing our attention, and serving as the focus of our collective lives? What we don't want gives us clues of what we do want -- a community with trust, a community with moderation, a community with abundance and shared resources, a community with mutual respect for one another.
Staying focused on the positive and on our vision of the ideal is often a conversation stopper. But it doesn't have to be. We just need to get into a new habit of talk, where we think about creating something even better rather than fixing something that is broken. Perhaps remembering that it is the human interaction that we most adore may help.
I firmly believe that we can create these vibrant communities, and can have sustained conversations --even energetic ones -- when we start to see our creations come to be: the new park where people can relax and play, the new family that we moved in, the neighborhood high school students that we collectively watched over and helped to succeed. The number of conversations -- and subsequent creations -- is endless.
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