Volume 8, Issue 1 , Pages 9-11, January 2012
The Perfect Storm, The Rise of Localism, and its Effects on National Wellness
Article Outline
By any one of several dozen measures — here are three:
—the United States is a society of ailing communities. Our national wellness is poor, and this condition exists and is growing just as the country and the world are entering into a perfect storm of transition. Here are just a few of the trends I see:
In this perfect storm of change, given the news that you see on your television, don't you think it is urgent that we ask the right questions about how we are to get through this storm of change? I think we can all agree that if you don't ask the right questions you won't get the answers you need to solve the problem. Here is my suggestion for the central question: How are individuals, families, and communities to weather this transition while maintaining a decent quality of life? One answer to that question can be discerned in the rise of localism and the regionalism that results as local efforts spontaneously spring up and spread community to community creating regional networks of citizen efforts.
Here on South Whidbey Island, where I live, three women, Mary Fisher, Dorit Zingarelli, and Jonni Reed, created a small foundation, Whidbey Island Nourishes.1 Very shortly after that, in a pattern that is typical of these programs, Shirley Collins joined them; soon others would follow. WIN, recognizing that some of the island's children were homeless and others lived in homes where the school lunch program was their main source of nutrition, asked themselves: What do these kids do over the weekend? What do homeless or couch-surfing teens do about food? They discovered the answer: they went hungry. That was not acceptable to them.
They designed and implemented a two-part program. Small children, whose families signed up, are sent home with two grocery bags—one for Saturday, one for Sunday. Into each goes enough food that these paper bag stashes can easily feed several. The women soon realized that other family members needed this food as well. Adults, particularly single mothers, would go without so their littles could eat. For the teen program, the WIN women set up iceboxes in four locations around the island, and stuff them with take out sandwiches, raw vegetables, and healthy treats. The youth community of Whidbey police this system, and there is almost no pilferage by the unqualified. No fast food is involved. The sandwiches and snacks, as with the younger children's program, are lovingly made of fresh nutritious ingredients, much of it organic, so that kids get the least possible amount of chemicals in their diets. No fast food, no fat and sugar laced treats. WIN works with the latest research data—imagine that—outlining what is required to nurture healthy kids. The program imposes no ideological or theological limitations. Neither the kids who participate nor their families are lectured at or preached to. They're just helped, and it is all done with a notable attitude of respect for the children and the families—as opposed to seeing them as “wards of the state” who have to be taken care of, however begrudgingly.
My wife, Ronlyn, who is one of the volunteers, bakes every other week. As I watch her carefully wrap each of the iPhone-sized rectangles—this week it is zucchini bread made with shredded zucchinis from our garden, organic whole wheat flour, and walnuts—and add it to the growing pile on our kitchen table she tells me WIN is now feeding 240 kids each weekend, up from 200 this time last year. So now she and several other women each bake seven dozen at a time, where before it was only five dozen. Other teams of women assemble the rest of the food. One out of four families in our community—25%—are now on some kind of food assistance. Nationwide it is one in eight. Forty-nine million Americans struggle to eat.2 It is very important to remember that about 17 million minor children in America know real hunger, and that 14.5% of American households did not have enough to eat throughout the year in 2010.3 How we justify this to ourselves while spending $300 million a day in Afghanistan alone I cannot fathom.4
WIN is not a singleton. On Whidbey we have an interlocking network of small foundations that collectively create the social safety net government has failed to provide. I wrote about this once before.5 The volunteers who devote themselves to these programs understand that their work is not just an act of service in support of an individual, but an act of community building that will benefit everyone, including themselves. When people feel supported and not alienated, they do not act out in retaliation. The proof of this is Whidbey's low crime rate, where our level of unemployment and poverty would predict much more theft, graffiti, robberies, and physical spousal abuse, to name just a few of the benefits. Other communities are coming to see the same thing.
In Napa, California, philanthropist Bonnie Meyers has created Thrive Napa, a movement similar to what is occurring on Whidbey.6 What makes these movements different than traditional values based charities is that these programs make few judgments. Families are not pressed to join, convert, listen to, or align with any ideology or theology before their children receive assistance. And they are always treated with dignity.
In Rockland, Maine, the Island Institute, one of the first groups in the nation to seriously focus on what constitutes a sustainable and resilient community, helps Maine's year round islands and coastal towns to be proactive in maintaining community health in the face of unemployment, poverty, a failing healthcare system, and a host of other crises.7
I have been collecting stories about these groups for several years now, and it has taught me that there are thousands of such efforts around the country. These are almost always citizen efforts, created with little or no reference to government or government funding, although some government funding may come when the program's success is obvious. These programs arise not as ways people devise to make a living for themselves—one of the notable things about them, is how few people become permanent bureaucrats. Training others to replace yourself is part of the culture. These programs are the response of an individual or small group to a perceived sense of injustice, unfairness, or need.
One of the things that stands out when you examine these efforts is that increasingly they are built on a tacit assumption of cultural and geographical regionalism. For us on Whidbey, this means Cascadia, an area west of the Cascadia Range, running roughly from Northern California to the Canadian border, with Vancouver often included. The upper Northeastern states make another regional grouping, and Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Eastern Texas, and Arkansas constitute yet another. This is happening because what works on Whidbey would not work in Mobile. The social and cultural dynamics are so different that they are as great as the difference between Greece and Germany.
America is becoming a defacto alliance of countries, much as some of the Founders who were focused on States Rights originally envisioned. Social progressives have not yet embraced the emerging new States Rights movement, so passionately espoused by the Right. But I think this is coming because as the Federal level twists in gridlock and corruption at a scale that would have made Rome blush, the need for new strategies will not be denied. A true taste of this rot can be seen in Thomas Ferguson's depiction of the state of the American Congress:
Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, our Congressional parties now post prices for key slots on committees. You want it—you buy it, runs the challenge. They even sell on the installment plan: You want to chair an important committee? That'll be $200,000 down and the same amount later, through fundraising. Unlike most retailers, though, Congressional leaders selling committee positions never offer discounts. Prices only drift up over time.
This practice is perhaps the one case where bipartisanship flourishes in Congress today. The Democrats' 2008 price schedules quoted in Currinder's Money in the House are just variations on themes introduced by the Republicans in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich brought in the earliest versions of “pay to play” and Tom DeLay consulted computer printouts of members' contributions at meetings to decide on committee chairs. Everybody in D.C. is in on the game. Only the public is still in the dark.8
Because of this rising tsunami of money and corruption, and the fact that it takes 60 votes to move anything of substance through the Senate—which is to say very little does move—meaningful solutions are gestating less and less at the Federal level, regional distinctions are becoming ever more exacerbated, and different approaches to social needs are emerging regionally and locally. People literally do not have time for what is going on in Washington, and they do not agree on the kind of country they want anyway. With a constipated Federal apparatus and the need so great and urgent, the bonds that bound us together as a nation are fraying as they have at no other time in our history except for the Civil War and, in a strange way, this just adds to the disempowerment of the Federal level, creating a self-reinforcing loop.
The corporate media's inability to accurately see what is going on makes matters worse. To calibrate this, remember how for the first several weeks of the 99er Movement Big Media didn't have a clue what was going on. Their criticism of the movement, that it had no clear political agenda, missed the obvious. The Movement has a very clear cultural goal: the preservation of the middle class. Corporate media couldn't or wouldn't see this, which demonstrates, I think, how big a rift has opened between their world and real life.
It will be important to see if this emerging street movement can translate its momentum into a political movement that votes its agenda, but the rising trend of localism and regionalism suggests it will. When it does, it will either fundamentally change Washington, or tear the country apart. That's what scares the entrenched interests.
As I walk around Langley, the nearest village to me, I see very few obese people, particularly children. There is less hyperactive behavior among the young. There are no fast food restaurants. In the community-run coffee house, South Whidbey Commons—another of those small foundations—I see kids studying, and able to get online for free.9 There is no graffiti on the walls here. I have not seen a pregnant homeless girl since I arrived three years ago. I have never been panhandled, and have never even heard of a car break-in. Whidbey is far from perfect, but it, and dozens of other communities in Cascadia, Maine, and elsewhere thrive even in adverse situations because of the citizen-created local programs that make everyone's life better.
It isn't clear to me how we are going to handle climate change, or rising sea levels, but we will. Small communities across America are rediscovering what Benjamin Franklin understood. For America to prosper there must be a balance between individualism, and collectivism. The hyperindividualism that would lead an audience of Americans to boo a soldier offering up his life in the service of his country, or to applaud an ignorant governor who revels in having killed more than 200 people—at least one of whom was almost certainly innocent—is not Franklin's America. It is a kind of Ayn Randian perversion of his ideas.
When Franklin—the only founder who drafted and signed all three of the documents that brought the United States to being, the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris (September 3, 1783), and the Constitution—dreamed of the America he would like to see develop, the imagery that came to his mind was of a middle-class, largely urban culture made up of immigrants who were technologically sophisticated, family oriented, joyful, upwardly mobile, and who understood that individualism must be tempered by collective action involving both the government and citizen action. When he thought about how we might become that society, it wasn't just the people he thought about. He also understood the importance of infrastructure as a factor in creating a middle class. He felt so strongly about this that he used his will to continue to support his plan for America beyond his death.
He left specific bequests for public works and created the microlending model that has proven such a powerful transformative force, leaving what today would be several hundred thousand dollars each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia. The infrastructure money was to be used specifically to build such an infrastructure and nurture such a middle class. He explained his intent was to create that “Which may be judged of most general utility to the Inhabitants, such as Fortifications, Bridges, Aqueducts, Public Buildings, Baths, Pavements or whatever may make living in the Town more convenient to its People and render it more agreeable to Strangers, resorting thither for Health or a temporary residence.”10
The secret of America is that we are all immigrants, even the Native Americans came from somewhere else—the latest genetic research showing them arriving from East Asia.11 What made America great was that people could come from anywhere and, as long as they subscribed to the idea of Franklin's great middle-class democratic culture, they could belong. The regional nasty nativism growing in some parts of the country is a violation of that vision, and further evidence that different regions of the country hold very different visions of what they want the nation to be.
In this is the mystery: the overall trends in our culture seem to be heading into chaos, brought on by this perfect storm of transition. But through the mechanism of localism and regionalism there is spontaneously arising a road map into the future. It is not going to be the America we grew up in but, in at least some regions, it will be better.
References
- . http://www.whidbeyislandnourishes.org/ Accessed October 14, 2011
- Hunger and poverty statistics (Feeding America) . http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts/hunger-and-poverty-statistics.aspx n.d. Accessed October 13, 2011
- . Our Sputtering Economy by the Numbers: Poverty Edition . ProPublica http://www.propublica.org/article/our-sputtering-economy-by-the-numbers-poverty-edition September 20, 2011; Accessed September 20, 2011
- Afghan war costs $300 million a day: Pentagon (Agencé France-Presse) . http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gNQ3JbWwd6t-PzkuECkRJvsAlNkA Accessed September 20, 2011
- . Trends That Will Affect Your Future É Mr South Whidbey, Globalization, and the Worship of Profit . Explore . 2010;6:15–16 http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2809%2900368-1/ Accessed October 14, 2011
- . http://www.thrivenv.org/ Accessed October 14, 2010
- . www.islandinstitute.org/ Accessed October 12, 2011
- . Posted prices and the capitol hill stalemate machine . The Washington Spectator http://www.washingtonspectator.org/articles/20111015postedprices.cfm Accessed October 15, 2011
- . http://southwhidbeycommons.org/ Accessed October 14, 2011
- The Last Will and Testament of Benjamin Franklin (Franklin Institute) . http://www.fi.edu/franklin/family/lastwill.html Accessed October 8, 2011
- . Did the Orientation of the Continents Hinder Ancient Settlement of the Americas? . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell; 2011; http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-09/w-dto092111.php Accessed October 14, 2011
Stephan A. Schwartz is the editor of the daily Web publication The SchwartzReport (http://www.schwartzreport.net), which concentrates on trends that will shape the future, an area of research he has been working in since the mid-1960s. He is also the Senior Samueli Fellow in Brain, Mind and Healing at the Samueli Institute. For over 35 years Schwartz has also been an active experimentalist doing research on the nature of consciousness, particularly Remote Viewing, healing, creativity, religious ecstasy, and meditation. He is the author of several books and numerous papers, technical reports, and general audience articles on these topics.
The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.
PII: S1550-8307(11)00303-X
doi:10.1016/j.explore.2011.11.003
© 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Volume 8, Issue 1 , Pages 9-11, January 2012
