I was thinking today about something my dad told me a long while back. Something I never really gave much thought until I was day dreaming on the back porch. (Day Dreaming due to unemployment and no call backs after over 100 applications ... its ok though I'll be back in school in August) Anyways back to what my dad told me. He said when he was a kid he knew the guy who sold him food personally, because his dad knew him, and the whole community knew him. Even crazier still, the guy at the market knew the people he got most of the food from. He knew which farmers got him the meats and the vegetables and the fruit. He had personal relationships with them. So my dad was only the second step that food went on. Farmer -> Market -> people.
My thoughts below ...
I then tried to think about my relationship to food in such direct terms. The first thing that came to mind was I only know very few cashiers at super markets, and I know them through school. Cashier is not going to be their life long profession so building that relationship does not build a relationship with my food. Furthermore, the cashiers I know do not know the people who grows the food, from where it is shipped, or even where it is grown. They don't even know how many stops it takes along the way, whether or not the people growing or raising it are ethical or who they are. So I thought to myself I'm eating blind. No one in the past would have settled for this, they wanted to know where their food came from etc. They only ate food from people they trust, yet I eat food from people I don't even know.
When my dad was a kid there were still shoe makers, and meat markets, and all sorts of other small specialty shops that did very personalized work. Today I don't know who makes my shoes, nor can I get them repaired by someone I know. Perhaps even in my dad's day he didn't know the person who made the shoe itself, but he knew who could fix it. He also had a foundation of trust with that person. Hell that person trusted my dad's family to do stuff for them too. There was this magical thing called community. It was based on trust, knowing each other, and fulfilling needs within the community.
Then I thought to my self, when I did have a job recently I didn't know my real boss. Sure I had a supervisor but I had no real relationship to the company. I didn't know their ethics or anything, well I knew what I saw in the training video. I had no real relationship with them, nor they with me. I made them money by doing my job, and they gave me some small percentage of that back as a wage.
So I'm sitting here, unemployed really thinking about this. I don't know who I worked for, I don't know who is growing my food, hell I was not really related to what I distributed, and I don't even know my neighbors all that well. Where did community go? When times are hard and everything is falling apart the community is supposed to come together and help each other. But, if there is no community with a foundation of trust and interdependence this cannot happen. By losing the community structure, I thought to myself, I lost a safety net. By thinking in terms of I, I lost a sense of community in the first place. We lost a safety net.
My girl friend is looking for work currently and has her BA already (WOOT). Unfortunately work is really hard to find, and even harder if you do not have relationships that grant you "ins". These relationships used to be all over the place, because you knew the people in your community. However I feel this current situation isolates people, and makes them vulnerable to being taken advantage of. Lack of community = vulnerable people. Those were my thoughts today.
Share your thoughts with me if you will.
Edit: just to be clear this is not a call for the good ol' days or anything like that. I'm 27 years old and just want to see communication in the community again. When I was a kid, kids still played outside. That's vanishing. People are becoming isolated and that scares me. So in the end I'm calling for new days in which communication between people (you know face to face communication) is an integral part. Just sayin
