MIND MOVES:Something was lost in madness of Celtic Tiger, writes TONY BATES
“We can never get a re-creation of community and heal our society without giving our citizens a sense of belonging.”
– Patch Adams
IN THE recent riots in Britain, there was a moment of profound grace when the father of a 16-year-old boy spoke to a crowd of horrified and confused teenagers. Rioters had accidentally killed his son, an innocent bystander, as they drove from the scene with their bounty. His father’s words cut right to the heart of everything that was wrong in the lives of those young people and pointed towards the solution.
“I look around and I see white kids and black kids and yellow kids and brown kids,” he said. “You are all my community, and if we stand together we can get through this.”
We all share a fundamental need to belong and feel connected. And when this is missing, we should expect anything but love for the people around us.
We feel connected when we sense that we have something in common with a particular group. It may be that we share with them the same geography – we live in the same town – or that we share a passion for the same team, the same political party, or because we are members of the same family.
Community is that place where we feel a sense of belonging. Within our community, we experience our lives as having meaning. Being part of this group makes us feel we are part of something greater than ourselves. Without them, we feel painfully isolated; with them, we sense that we can achieve something greater than any one of us could on our own.
In travelling around this country in recent weeks, I have observed that many people are finding their way back to a sense of community, something that got tragically lost in the madness of Celtic Tiger era.
People are learning about each other and from each other and discovering that there may be other ways of doing things than they ever thought possible. People are talking about the future rather than raking over the past, about what they can do together now, rather than what they failed to do in the past.
Perhaps this is happening because we sense we need each other more than ever; perhaps it is happening because the scarcity of resources has made it easier to let go the illusion that government will make everything right.
This is not to imply that government is off the hook, but that a psychological sense of community grows out of people taking back the power they had delegated to others.
To change how we live, we first need to change how we talk to one another. Without realising it, we may be speaking in a language that locks us into an experience of hopelessness and inertia.
"Words are not immortal," Brian Friel wrote in his play Translations. "It can happen that a civilisation can become imprisoned in a linguistic contour that no longer matches the landscape of fact."
Change requires that we see the limits of language, especially the language of problems, fear and retribution, and move into a different conversation where the focus is on what is not broken, what is possible and what really matters to people.
In the past, we have invested a lot in trying to graft “evidenced-based” programmes onto communities that were broken. And, for the most part, this approach hasn’t worked.
Communities are complex living things that have their own way of operating. Unless local people are actively engaged and accountable in bringing about change, innovations rarely become a regular part of daily life.
While professional services are built around people’s deficiencies, a sense of community is built on an appreciation of people’s gifts. The work of community building is about bringing the gifts at the margin into the centre and making sure they are nurtured and facilitated.
A sense of community depends on each of us being able to appreciate the relationships we have, no matter how inconsequential they seem, and to value the daily encounters with the people who provide the services that make our lives possible.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – the National Centre for Youth Mental Health (Headstrong.ie)