I started writing a response to this last night but was too tired to finish it. I would, I decided, finish it in the morning. I’ve just come into to it to do just that when I realised…how arrogant is that title? How I (you in the prompt) would improve my community. So, I think I’m going to have to start again!
We have many communities that we are a part of. We have the community within which we live, the community within which we socialise, the community within which we work, and if we have children we have a community that is shaped around their lives such as their school. Through our work, no matter what it is we do, at some point there is a community that either we serve or what we do, serves. Community is all around us. And what is community? “A group of people living in the same place or having a characteristic in common.” as well as “the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.”. Meaning, therefore, we also have a political community, a sporting community, a religious community and a cultural community. And so on and so forth. So, when it comes to the question – how I would improve my community, the first conundrum is: which one? I know, for example, that the majority of the community in which I live does not support the football team I tenuously support (I don’t watch or go to any football matches!). I know that there are a fair few in my community who do not follow the national rugby team I do (who I do watch). Equally there will be many who do not share my political views nor my religious ones. So, if I ‘improve’ one community what is the impact on another? And one person’s improvement is another person’s negative impact.
There is, however, another community. One that exists at the macro level. And that is the community of us as human beings. That is a community I would like to put some attention onto. I know I am starting to sound like a broken record, but this fact cannot be stressed enough I feel. That human community, us as a species, is not separate fundamentally. We are not separate from nature nor from the cosmos whether that is our solar system, our galaxy, or the universe as a whole. The entire thing is one living, breathing organism that is inextricably linked to all the myriad parts that make it up, including us. All those different aspects of community listed above come from one main community that should be entirely cohesive. Not in its views and opinions, the beauty of being human is that we are diverse, no, in how we see the world around us.
We are part of a collective conscious that extends across the whole universe, that communicates continuously with us if we would just take the time to listen to it. A classic example of a community that is connected to the collective conscious is the indigenous tribes around the fallout of the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004. In our arrogance, it was feared that they had all perished in their remote habitats because they were seen as being ‘primitive’. And yet, they all survived. How? Their connection to the collective conscious. The animals sensed the impending disaster, maybe the humans did too, and they made for higher ground before the earthquake that triggered the tsunami struck. And they survived. The other people in the hit zone who were not connected to the collective conscious were unaware of the disaster that was about to unfold. So, I would love for all the communities that I am a part of to be connected to each other and listen to the collective conscious – because it’s talking to us constantly. And it isn’t saying support West Ham United over Tottenham Hotspur, it’s saying enjoy the art that is football and remember it’s an entertainment sport. So, there’s no need for ridiculous and serious arguments over it and certainly no need for violence about it. Yes, be passionate but keep it in a context. Because the more important thing is that there are people, who are part of a collective conscious, enjoying elite athletes playing a game that they enjoy. That’s fundamentally all it is. Tribalism isn’t necessary on this subject.
Scientists have now proven that when a tree suffers damage or is cut down, the process is painful and that pain message is sent through to the other trees via the root system. We all know that the rings on the trees tell a plethora of stories about what has happened during its lifetime in terms of weather patterns and the like. It has also been proven that birds ‘somehow’ avoid the wind turbines, so a lot fewer than expected are killed. Who tells the birds where to migrate to and when? Who tells any group of animals when to migrate and where? The collective conscious. If we listened to it, tuned into its frequency, we would learn a greater respect for our environment, and for each other. I am 100% behind saving our species by saving the environment…but not by the sometimes violent, often thoughtless, methods that are deployed. That smacks of a lack of connection, it’s performative and actually turns people away from the message. It shows a lack of respect for our fellow humans, and as a result doesn’t achieve much for nature. If we listened to the collective conscious, though, we would hear its pain, and I hope we would start to work towards easing it. We can’t uninvent things like cars, but we can manage our utilisation of them (and I’m not talking about 15 minute cities here) such as car sharing – which could have the added benefit of helping to overcome loneliness. In our village, what is wrong with a message going out – I’m going to Tesco, who wants to come with? Or, if you can’t come with, can I get anything for you? And we can find better ways of making and running them that doesn’t ruin the environment – lithium mines, anyone? Why are we not investing in fuels such as hydrogen? Apparently wave technology for energy is ‘not financially viable’. For something that is more guaranteed than wind…someone, somewhere is benefitting from that approach and it isn’t the collective conscious.
It’s things like – do we need to eat Egyptian strawberries just so we can have them all year round? I remember as a child only being able to have strawberries in the summer, and while I am guilty of enjoying them all year round why can’t I just wait? There’s other foodstuffs I can enjoy the rest of the year. Plus there’s also the advantage of frozen berries if I really need the kick of a bowl. Eating seasonally and locally including odd-shaped fruit and veg would go some way to reducing the over-intensification of farming and improve the environment. I have yet to meet anyone bothered by the shape of a carrot except some government technocrat trying to justify their position. It’s a nonsense. And this is where I think we seek to have dominion over nature. The attitude of ‘I want (say) strawberries in December, so I will have them’ no matter how transporting them to us is costing the environment – shipping has a greater carbon footprint than flying, for example. And both are pretty bad.
Instead, we could begin to educate others about how we impact the environment, how simple things like respecting it more would have a seismic impact. One such way is how we have become such a throwaway society. We have cheap clothing, cheap food (not nutritious often), cheap cars, cheap technology. And what happens to it when it’s finished? We throw it. Recently, my son inadvertently bought some Manga books online that turned out to be in Spanish and Italian. It was apparently cheaper for the company to give him a refund and for him to keep the books than it was to return them. So, presumably they will print more when there is the demand for them. As for my son’s books, they have been sent for recycling. But there has already been a process for creating them…surely it would have been better for them to have been accepted by the vendor as a return? The levels of clothing that is now in landfill is obscene. Partly because they’re cheap so they don’t last long but also because they’ve gone out of fashion so are no longer required. A few years ago, the concept of the Circular Economy was introduced with sites like Vinted being an offshoot. I purchase from Vinted and am going to be selling on there soon. I also donate to charity shops (which is becoming an endeavour in and of itself). Sites such as the Facebook page is also great for this – I got rid of a sofa that way a few years ago, it was free to anyone who could get transport to my house to remove it. I love that. And I buy from there too, I bought a gorgeous French dresser from the site for example. But people do look down on this, as though somehow there is something wrong with it, and something wrong with you for doing it. Buying new is some kind of status symbol. When companies build in obsolescence into electrical goods simply so they can sell you more, and those electrical goods are rarely harvested for their spare parts but are just disposed of into landfill where they don’t biodegrade…should we continue to buy from them? Or should we instead support the people who can repair our white goods? By utilising the latter I have extended the life of my washing machine by another 5 years. So far. Why can’t we do more with the Circular Economy? Stop it being a buzz phrase and make it a reality? The impact on the environment will be huge.
We build buildings with concrete and glass which are so harmful for the environment. Concrete because it doesn’t last, and glass because it reflects and/or refracts the sun. I lived in a house that was almost all glass and the heat in the summer was unbearable as equally was the cold in the winter. How do we counteract that? Air conditioning and heating, the production of both being harmful to the environment. Steel is another harmful impact on the environment. But we build with no real sense of the building’s longevity. In the 1990’s I worked in a building that was next door to the Tower of London, the White Tower having been built in the 1000’s. The building I worked in no longer exists because of concrete cancer after 30 or 40 years of being there. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the irony – if the White Tower could roll its eyes I’m sure it would.
I would improve my community by suggesting that medicalising everything is perhaps only helping the pharmaceutical companies. We medicalise depression rather than get to its root cause and helping people to recover rather than just suppress. Because we can’t suppress things like that forever. We medicalise neurodivergence – has neurodivergence always been there and we’re now only taking notice because there’s medicine for it? Who benefits from that? I have been told that if I was tested I would likely be diagnosed with ADHD. It hasn’t come on suddenly, I have always been the way I am in certain respects so ADHD was clearly around in the 1970’s, and obviously earlier. It’s likely that people with undiagnosed autism have a different dementia experience than those without autism, something that is barely researched. So, why are we so hot on neurodivergent diagnoses now? So we can medicalise it, so governments can keep classroom sizes too large, so we can blame something external. But if neurodivergence has always been a thing, just not something that has been recognised or discussed the world hasn’t come to an end because pharmaceutical companies weren’t involved. Far from it, what has come from neurodivergence is almost certainly a huge amount of wonderful creativity and innovation – what happens to that if it is all medicalised? I’m not for a moment suggesting we brush it under the carpet and pretend it isn’t there, thereby causing significant amounts of damage to people psychologically. No, I am suggesting we acknowledge and accept it and help find better ways of understanding it through the collective conscious. But not suppressing it.
There is so much more to say here, but that’s for another post I suspect. But how I would improve my community would be through bringing to their awareness that we are connected, we are all one. That we see life through that prism, see ourselves without the bigotry and the individualism. And that we recognise that we aren’t just connected to humans but to everything, as everything is connected to us. So we feel their joy and their pain as they do ours. And we work together, as that collective, to right the wrongs of individualism and finally live more peaceful lives. That’s how I would like to improve my community.
Louisa Simpson 