Common Good Collective

Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Reader, Significance Of Place Permalink

American Must BECOME a Democracy

Communitarians around the world often point out that the communities that flourish are the ones who decide to love the actual community they are in, rather than attaching themselves to a romanticized idea of what a community could be. Friend of Common Good Collective David Korten writes here about what that idea might look like on a national scale.

A few days ago, I shared with YES! Executive Editor Zenobia Jeffries Warfield an insight that felt both fresh and important: “I’m coming to the conclusion that the United States has never been a democracy.” This insight was sparked by my reflection on the testimony of Judge Amy Coney Barrett during the Senate hearing on her nomination for the Supreme Court.

Zenobia replied, “David, you’re not alone in your conclusion; it’s a refrain I’ve heard in my immediate and extended communities most of my life.”

Zenobia and I are products of very different life experiences. She is a Black woman. I am a White man. I was raised to believe in the great American myth. She grew up with the truth closer at hand.

Our exchange reminded me of my own very human capacity for enduring fealty to myths we know to be untrue.

I’m coming to the conclusion that the United States has never been a democracy.

Elder Wisdom for the Future

Good relationships between villages and their elders is one sure sign of a healthy community. Elders, hold wisdom and memory that help individuals define themselves as part of a wide network – as one New Testament passage says, “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.” This essay highlights two Black elders nearing 100 years old, an achievement that is all too rare in their communities.

The two oldest men I know are my Dad, who turned 96 last week, and Harold G. Logan, 98, a retired hospital administrator who is the father of a close friend. I’ve had conversations with each of these African American village elders about the upcoming presidential election.

It’s an opportunity that too few can enjoy. It’s hard to find a Black man in his 90s. And when it comes to that centennial year, the situation is appalling. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, there were only 1,900 African American men aged 100 and over in the entire country, according to a report released last year by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

This is Your Brain on Neoliberalism

The economy is making you sick. It is probably also making you at least a little nutty. And to add to the injury, the neoliberal economy wants you to think this is normal. Freedom calls for a departure, a re-ordering, a definite “NO!” to the economics of death, and an imaginative entering into a wilderness that might make us closer to free.

In 2006, Australian television writer and producer Rhona Byrne released The Secret, a DVD closely followed by a 268-page book with the tagline “Feel good. Change your life.” The Secret is based on the ‘law of attraction’, which, she argues, all the great men of history knew governed their lives – “Plato, Leonardo, Galileo, Napoleon, Hugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Edison, Einstein, and Carnegie, to name but a few.” According to this law, whatever befalls us in life does so because we attracted it, through positive or negative thinking. The book, which has sold over 9 million copies and been translated into 46 languages, tells us: “Everything you see and experience in this world is effect, and that includes your feelings. The cause is always your thoughts … Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can!’’ For me, as a pudgy 14-year-old growing up in a small town on the outskirts of Leeds, and often finding myself at the sharp end of inequality, gendered violence and racism, this provocation was confusing to say the least. But nevertheless, I fashioned myself a makeshift vision board, cut some inspiring looking (read: thin, white) models out of old Look magazines, and got to cosmic ordering.

Small Ideas Create Lasting Community Change

Big changes start with small ideas. One simple adjustment – sewing a missing button, a good night’s sleep, an altered uniform, a good meal to a weary worker – can beget change many times over. In this week’s Common Good reader, we celebrate small interventions in community problems that wind up creating large, lasting impact.

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Invitation, Poetry for Building Community, Reader Permalink

A Hymn to the Evening

In “Hymn to the Evening,” the legendary Phillis Wheatley writes, “Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind….” So may it be, in the chaos of our world, that we rest deeply, and upon rising, work well together.

A Hymn to the Evening
by Phillis Wheatley

Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main
The pealing thunder shook the heav’nly plain;
Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing,
Exhales the incense of the blooming spring.
Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes,
And through the air their mingled music floats.
Through all the heav’ns what beauteous dies are spread!
But the west glories in the deepest red:
So may our breasts with ev’ry virtue glow,
The living temples of our God below!
Fill’d with the praise of him who gives the light,
And draws the sable curtains of the night,
Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind,
At morn to wake more heav’nly, more refin’d;
So shall the labours of the day begin
More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin.
Night’s leaden sceptre seals my drowsy eyes,
Then cease, my song, till fair Aurora rise.

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