Connections

I feel strangely nostalgic for the Coronavirus years of 2020-21. While the disease threatened and terrified us, and some institutional responses were adverse, good things also happened.  

People connected with each other. They checked in on their vulnerable neighbours and organised grocery drops.  

They gathered in any way that they could and revived quaint interests from sourdough baking to crocheting and book clubs. We turned towards each other and connected in good ways.

As we turned to each other the overwhelming health, social, political and economic clamour that the pandemic caused erupted. 

Big people with loud voices and strong opinions stood out and provided both useful and questionable commentary on what the pandemic would and should mean. Some of that commentary helped, but other parts of it confused us and intensified our anxiety.  

We needed to decompress and normalise our days. We did that through our connections. Kindness became our dominant social ethic. We “checked in” on each other.

In these past months I’m again feeling a little compressed, vulnerable and isolated. It’s not because of a viral pandemic, but because of the impacts of local and international political movements and the media noise that amplifies them all …

More big people with loud voices and strong opinions telling us how things are and should be, promoting the not-so-new social ethic of self-interest. This clamour can turn us away from, and even against each other.  

At the beginning of this century the political scientist, Robert D. Putnam observed a degeneration of social and community connections in his own USA setting (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon and Schuster, 2001/rev 2020: and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, Simon and Schuster, 2020).  

He reported shifts from communitarianism to individualism and its effects on the construction or erosion of social capital as people became disconnected from family, friends, neighbours and other social structures and institutions.  

This absurdly led to an entirely new, “Species of association whose members never actually meet”.  This, in his view, has contributed to political polarisation, bitter public discourse and a breakdown of the healthy connections that hold people and communities together.      

Putnam goes on to observe that local connections and associations are the effective counterbalance to the negative social effects of individualism and the “big voices” that demand our anxious complicity.  

We limit the adverse impacts of the “big voices” when we connect and gather to do the hard and enriching work that comes when we are with people who are “not-always-like-us”.  Those connections ground us, build social capital and hush the rancorous clamour .

In my nostalgia for 2020-21 I’ve dampened my media feeds and investigated the various community and social groups in the Southbank setting. This includes a deepening appreciation for the very real human and sacred connections that my church setting at St Johns provides me.  

Those connections aren’t “big” or “loud”, but they are alive.      

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