The Hunger for Community

Their voices and laughter drifted across the campground, the happiness in their bonding was as pleasant as birds singing in the early morning. My wife and I were sitting in front of our travel trailer, gently rocking in our chairs, perusing our reading material. A little out of character for us, we hadn’t put any music on the trailer’s stereo system so the only real “noise” in the campground was the unrehearsed, spontaneous, carefree conversation of the three or four couples sitting in front of another trailer a hundred feet away.

“Well, they sure are having a good time,”my wife remarked.

I nodded, a smile coming to my lips. She is naturally happier in solitude than I so I am not sure if she was finding their conversation and laughter as pleasant as I was. I enjoyed hearing the single conversations suddenly transform into three different conversations before they all returned to the same page. There were chuckles, throat clearings, and loud outbreaks of shared laughter. I really wasn’t paying much attention to what they were saying, just enjoying the natural cadence of the conversations. It reminded me how things used to be in America – in the days when being neighborly was more than a quick wave before your garage door came down.

In modern America, we are obsessed with our mental, physical, and emotional health while we rob ourselves of the single best remedy for all three – the sense of community. We have allowed “community” to become an audience of faceless people on the internet and accepted “wisdom” from educated elites talking on screens and writing in high brow publications. We have tried so hard to remove everything potentially “offensive” to anyone from our conversations that they are now devoid of honesty, becoming so vanilla that they are no longer interesting. We have and are allowing high-browed elitists to rewrite our history, redefine our morality, change our culture, and divide us in ways we once thought impossible. In doing so, they have created a huge swath of our society that is only comfortable in front of a screen, enveloped on a personal echo chamber, and scared to death of being exposed to an idea or concept that is not consistent with the views espoused by their internet gods.

My earliest doses of “wisdom” were received sitting on the knee of my Grandpa. The seeds of common sense and roots of my essence were planted while sitting around family dinner tables, campfires, and rings of lawn chairs in a Tennessee back yard. Sometimes the conversations would turn to the issues of the day or the Pastor’s sermon on Sunday morning but, most of the time, the conversations were just about lives and personal experiences. The stories and thoughts did not always have to be “important” or “philosophical” and they were certainly not steeped in “political correctness.” They were, more often than not, just things that we experienced or witnesses during the day. The conversations were not run through personal filters to remove any hint of “offensiveness” or to determine if they would be culturally acceptable or deemed to be weighty enough to bring to the table.

We just shared life and that was how it was until the internet came along with twenty four hour news cycles, social media influencers and an absolute “expert” for almost any subject. We didn’t sense it at first but the wedges of division were starting to be hammered into place and now we live in our world where ideological purity is demanded, political correctness is an obsession, and even small talk is hard to find. The sense of real community is on it’s death bed as so many have forgotten the simple beauty of sharing life, wiping away each other’s tears, and celebrating the smaller triumphs found in every day life. If we can find a way to save “community” we might discover that the ties that bind us together are actually stronger than the forces that seek to isolate, divide, and control us.

So, I lifted a toast to my camping neighbors across the way, silently saluting them for reminding me how beautiful those moments can be, and how we should treasure the times we have with our friends and relatives. If we turn down the music, turn off the screens, and just listen we might find that the joys of yesteryear can still be found. Perhaps, if we are looking around and opening ourselves up a little bit, we might find ourselves finding a real community of people that just want to share life.