[1224] It Takes A Village

I woke up this morning with the sentiment, “It takes a village” echoing in my head.

Yesterday, I arrived at a farm that belongs to my new employers. According to him, it’s only 2 years old. There’s all of the classic farm animals besides cows. When I got there, a 15-year-old was driving a tractor with a bush hog. This is another social work job, mentoring, tutoring, case-managing, but this one comes with the actual life-infrastructure and physical engagement that children need to properly learn things.

While me and one of the owner’s talked, I was left with the 10-year-old younger brother of the boy on the tractor. He’d only been at the farm for 2 days. He asked how I got so tall as he wants to be a center or power forward in the NBA. I told him it’s mostly genetics, but that he also needs to eat right and avoid sugar. He proceeded to list the heights of a dozen family members on either of his parents’ sides. When the owner got back, he set the boy to a task of breaking down a little pen that got twisted by a recent storm. He wasn’t great at it, and the “little” things that speak to success or failure really get highlighted.

This farm is located pretty close to the Indianapolis “normal neighborhood,” off a busy road, space. The kids that come here aren’t generally doing manual labor, and if they’re with a program like this have areas in which they or their family are struggling fairly significantly. The many things that you may take for granted in how to take down and move a small animal pen don’t exist in the mental framework of a child like this. He’s likely to pinch his fingers pushing in the little metal button that snaps into place. He’s not thinking about how to stack the polls in the cart so they don’t spill over the sides as he wheels it back to the barn.

I think most good parents are going to have thousands of examples like this in watching their kids grow up. It becomes too-obvious how much is missing and what else is needed in order for your child to thrive and survive. I don’t think it excuses, but I think it meaningfully accounts, for why so many immigrant families in particular put such an emphasis on working hard or getting extremely educated. Not that long ago, the alternative was pretty regular and visceral oppression and death. You need to be able to do things correctly. You need to be able to persist. A place like a farm will wise you up to that and humble your worst ideas very quickly.

Whatever you can say about the kids that find themselves under the care of a social worker, it’s ten-fold for their parents. The community is deficient. The family structure or set of assumptions is broken. There’s not just one messy or evil person going around sabotaging otherwise perfectly functioning spaces. As inclined as we are to bogey-man things, this framing always let’s us off the hook. This takes the direct impact of policy-makers and not-so-hidden agendas and keeps them abstract things to fight about.

There aren’t a lot of good-paying meaning-imbuing jobs that can account for the extent of needs. There aren’t enough institutions protecting and espousing a genuine education. There aren’t enough protections and long-term support systems that also don’t make people dependents. What we eat breaks our processing power and energy levels. What we watch reduces complexity into dopamine fixes. What we say keeps us trapped in circular self-sabotaging illogical blame games. We’re addicted, isolated, and constantly searching for heroes often ignoring the immediate fight we should be having every day.

Without a village, the loudest win. It’s a math equation at that point. The most violent, wins. The most diseased infects. The most money dictates. The village is the interplay and competition. If you refuse to play the game and stop competing, the worst wins. This is why we regulate markets. I think this is why we give mystical faithful beings codified evil to battle into infinity. We know we’re shaped by an immense amount of seemingly immeasurable forces, and individually it’s impossible to sort them out. In the interplay, we can mutually arrive at conclusions that enrich our knowledge and immune systems. It looks like teaching a kid how to stack things correctly. It looks like planting an idea seed that you shouldn’t eat too much sugar.

I’ve felt this problem for at least as long as my college cohort complained about how bleak the world looked at the time. There was a lot of discussion about what a little eco-village might look like. There was a lot of pain being felt about the lack of jobs. We stopped really hanging out, even before people flooded to Colorado and California. We neglected the best fix to the ever-atomized landscape provided by our phones, algorithms, and now A.I. We don’t challenge, learn, and meaningfully engage. We scroll through content. We default to irony. We allow ourselves to be crafted by forces that have nothing to do with why anyone would choose to stay alive.

Are you working because you love your job? Or are you paying the bills? Are you going to school and learning about how to craft and invest in the future? Or are you managing, poorly, debt and trying to look a certain way towards an employer who’s itching to outsource your job? Are you “dating,” or desperate to feel safe and find a narrative about being single, or childless, or “complicated” that doesn’t feel like a self-defeating parody? Would you drink the water in the nearest lake or river to you? Are you exhausted and checked-out trying to anticipate the fallout of “political” consequences?

Where’s your village? Who is in your tribe? Feckless democrats? A family more defined by the addictions and denial than anything passing for “love?” A friend group who sees each other once a year or less? A job that might cost you more in time, self-respect, and if you’re me, somehow MONEY, than you’re getting out of it? I’ve been in a dozen work environments where no one cared to unionize. I’ve watched friend groups deteriorate well after my exit. I’ve watched my family eat itself alive, next on the menu my alcoholic cousin gearing up to follow his older brother into death.

It’s our village’s complicity, a story told at every individual’s level, in how they respond, or don’t, to their suffering. Do they fight to protect the gifts and privileges and push what they’ve been given into even more, or wait for someone to “fix it?” No one is coming. No one was coming back in 2011 when all my friends pretended they were going to be a coherent accountable group. No is coming today or tomorrow. No one is going to teach you how to “adult” in a way that fights fascism one farm-lesson at a time.

For me, it’s always returning to what I have to do today, this hour, or when I write, this moment. I have to try to account, first. I have to try to articulate what I think is the problem altogether. I have to see my agency play out word by word. I have to control, at least one narrative, and look for evidence across time that I and what I’m responsible for exist independent of the amount of noise. It’s been work the whole time. It’s something that, were I not holding myself accountable to it, no one would do for me. I can take my existence on my land, my experiments entrepreneurally, and my patience and exploration for places to belong to for granted. I can also break them down and see them as a series of next-best-steps I could define about how to “deal with it all.”

When are we going to rebuild the village? When are we going to recognize the values haven’t changed? They’re no more complicated than the difference between specific practice and excuse-ridden theory. The excuses trap you in a job that doesn’t sustain you. They trap you in a family that exploits you. They trap you in a rental you’ll never own. They trap you under political leadership that sends you off cliffs financially, socially, and psychologically. What’s your, “This is how you stack the polls” thing you’re not doing for yourself right now? It has to be done thousands of times, together, right now, while the world continues to burn down around us. What’s the alternative?