Common Good Collective

Reader

This Reader is an expression of Common Good Collective, a vision for an alternative way, rooted in the act of eliminating economic isolation, the significance of place, and the structure of belonging. Whether you come at this from a place of economics, social good, or faith, we hope these reflections help orient your day in fresh, provocative, courageous ways. And most importantly, we hope these lead you into the sharing of gifts in particular communities—into co-creating a common good.

We read hundreds of articles and select the best ones for you by sending them to your inbox on Thursday.
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Reader, Structure Of Belonging, The Abundant Community Permalink

Cultivating Care in La COVIDa Loca

Long time activists and friends and Edgar Rivera Colon share an important conversation about community care. Drawing on their experience in navigating the AIDS crisis within their communities, they remind all of us who are harried and worried and burning out: “I’m part of a collective, even if I’m isolating. I’m a part of folks.”

When the AIDS epidemic came to light in 1981, the public health response was slow. Queer and vulnerable communities not only had to self-advocate, but also develop protocols of care to protect themselves and their loved ones. Although the coronavirus is very different from HIV, the legacy of AIDS activism nevertheless may offer lessons for the current health emergency on how to combat stigma, prevent spread on a community respectively.

In this conversation, artist, educator, and organizer Pato Hebert speaks with medical anthropologist Edgar Rivera Colón about life during the pandemic, its impacts on vulnerable communities, and the importance of cultivating an ethos of care while learning to live with the coronavirus. Hebert, whose work explores interconnectedness, has worked in grassroots HIV prevention initiatives with queer communities of color since 1994. Rivera Colón, an expert on Latinx queer cis male sexual cultures, trains health professionals as well as Black and Latinx activists on preventing HIV in their communities. Their insights from experiences in community activism, education, and spirituality permeate this discussion on inequality and resistance during the coronavirus crisis.

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 Covenant: Moving from Contract to Commitment, Eliminating economic isolation, Reader, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

The Great American Heist

Community Care is not only interpersonal, it is also structural. If you love your neighbor, even the ones across town that you don’t know, then you will want them to have some systemic, structural justice. Michael Harriot tells a gripping story of one South Carolina community, and reminds us that community care includes restitution – not as punishment, but as making people whole. 

Sometimes their children walked.

Sometimes their children rowed.

Sometimes their children died.

In 1948, when only 16 states in America had outlawed segregated public schools, Black parents in the tiny hamlet of Summerton, South Carolina, where three out of every four residents were Black, finally got tired of being robbed by white people. Their children were mostly just tired.

Every day, young Summertonians maneuvered through one obstacle course after another, only to be rewarded with an inferior education. If the children were lucky, they walked as far as nine miles to attend one of the segregated schools in Clarendon County’s District 22. On other days, rain would force students as young as 6 years old to wade across a stream to attend school. Often, when the water was particularly high, someone would provide a raft to row their way across the Lake Marion Reservoir. When they arrived at school, they would have to chop wood for their unheated classrooms … if they arrived.

Sometimes a student would just drown on the way.

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 Eliminating economic isolation, Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Reader, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

The One Percent’s $50 Trillion Dollar Tab

Near one Common Good Fellow’s home in North Carolina, someone put up a hand-painted sign that read “Money Isn’t Everything.” Which is true. But another neighbor saw that it required a rejoinder, and so wrote below it, “But It F@*^ing Helps!” Which is also true. Caring for neighbors is much easier when resources are equitably distributed.

Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.

How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.

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On the Loss of Energy…

When Alice Walker was reflecting on June Jordan, she said, “Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all of us. She is the universal poet.” In her inimitable voice, Jordan offers a scene, a pleading, a yearning for sanity and comfort and truth.

 

On the Loss of Energy (and Other Things) 

no more the chicken and the egg come
one of them
before the other
both
be fadin (steady)
from the supersafeway/a&p/giant
circus
         uh-huh
         the pilgrim cornucopia
         it ain’ a pot to pee in
         much
         (these days)

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