Hello Alamo!
Last week, I wrote about Daylight Saving Time, and I actually cared about it because I despise the insistence that we ruin our lives for a week based on ?????????? It was fun, I enjoyed it, and I sincerely hope you all go back and implement those tips this week so we’re not all walking corpses *this Sunday*.
This week’s motivation just isn’t really there. There are things going on around town, but none of them feel like enough to write a whole post about at this point. For events and opportunities, follow my Facebook page and/or check the calendar on here.
What really sets my soul on fire right now is the importance of community, so that’s what I’m going to write about today, and a lot more in the future.
As I am taking a turn toward mental health, I think it’s really important to address the loneliness epidemic. That disconnection from the community around you is so harmful to our mental health. Be as introverted as you need to be, but at the end of the day, we are a social species, and we do need each other. Hell, I’ve fought my whole life against people who despised that aspect of my personality, and there’s no going back for me now that I’ve learned to accept my own drive.
The past few years, a big interest I’ve had is learning about community and how it has been broken up over the years. There has been a long effort to dismantle what it means to be in community in this country, and I would like to actually have historical sources and such for some of it, so today, I’ll just focus a bit on the concept of the nuclear family.
5 years ago, David Brooks wrote about the nuclear family- basically wife, husband, and their “2.5 children,” prominent in the 1950s and ’60s- and why that ideal just no longer works. I recommend taking an hour or 2 to digest it, as it’s pretty great.
The idea behind the nuclear family does offer quite a bit of stability, and it definitely worked for some people at a very specific point in time. When unions were actually strong in this country, and women were on illicit drugs to deal with the pressures of homemaking!
The more we learn about the perspectives of the people who actually took on the brunt of making these time periods great, the closer we can get to actually being great, and not just projecting a lie that makes us look better.
We have always needed more than the nuclear family. Brooks points out the pros and cons of living in extended family households, and I think that’s great. However, that still smacks of thinking the only people worth caring for and about share your blood. Throwback to peak Millennial internet, but we live in a society. We live in comically large communities compared to the rest of the world, but we all live together. We all affect each other on a consistent basis, and it’s really imperative that we learn to actually care about that reality in a way that acknowledges each other’s humanity.
There will be plenty of weeks like today where I just won’t have anything to write about, and I’m going to start filling in those gaps by writing about intersectionality and solidarity and history, and why they are so paramount to our survival right now, like when hospitals made disabled folks sign DNRs for routine visits after people openly said we should just die 5 years ago during the onset of Covid.
It starts with us and what we allow ourselves to believe about our fellow human beings. I am quite pleased with how much this empathy and organizing already exists in Alamogordo. With the pressures we now face, I just want to make sure that there’s actually a humanitarian core underneath all of it. That’s what breeds true connection. I hope for your own sake you’ll join me in continuing to invest in community.
Salud.
No responses yet