Commonwealth

My struggle, recently, has been about my personal benefit and the common good. Well, honestly, it is one of many struggles that I seem to be immersed inside. The pandemic, lockdowns, financial crisis, social disruption, belief, and disbelief are swirling in my head and heart. Wow, that makes it all seem unfathomable and unfixable.

When I feel the stress of the world becoming heavy, I start reading about and thinking about something else. Often, I go back to books on social insects, superorganisms, and community. Two reads, "Honeybee Democracy" by Thomas Seeley and " The Superorganism" by Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, drew metaphors and comparisons to our society. But then, I turn a page and am jealous and embarrassed by how my/our rampant individualism is really just greed and selfishness masquerading as an imagined virtue.

The hive or colony exists because the members accept their responsibility to ensure its survival. Every member of the collective has a necessary and instrumental job, and if I may push anthropomorphism to its limits, purposeful. From what we understand, the worker bees or ants have some measure of autonomy, but it doesn't extend to the liberty of indifference. In their world, indifference means destruction, decay, and death. Their elimination or extinction is measured in years while we imagine that our systems and intellect allow us to measure in millennia.

And then along comes a disaster, conflict, or disease that is so widespread and invasive that it becomes our common enemy, and we finally and slowly embrace mutuality. I live in Calgary, Alberta, where we celebrate community and neighborhood involvement. Some of the mythology is true. For example, when many areas of the city were flooded, in 2013, by the two rivers that join near downtown, more than 25000 Calgarians donned boots in the early days and slogged into homes to help the residents carry out belongings and clean up the mess. As the flood continued, more people showed up to offer meals and furniture. We had each other's back, and ensuring that others came out of this disaster was a priority that brought us together.

The global pandemic has brought us together and ripped us apart. Most people I know and observe have chosen to trust the medical experts even when the restrictions are inconvenient and costly. Most are wearing masks, keeping socially distant, and following rules around cohorts and capacity. Where this has been done exceptionally well, the communities have thrived and reopened because the greater good was part of the calculation. Taking care of the elderly and the immunocompromised became the imperative even when it meant some measure of sacrifice. Vaccine uptake where I live is closing in on 70% first dose, and we have opened up second dose opportunities that could have that percentage fully vaccinated by the end of June. The hive members are doing what is best for the hive not just thinking about themselves.

It seems that most of the local and global issues that we are facing or will soon face could be dampened or reduced by collective cooperation rather than the dog-eat-dog mentality that bastardized capitalism has created. We are better together, we are better when we are in it together, we are better if I pause and consider you.

How do we get there from here? Probably not as a global population initiative or even at a national level program. Scale got us to this place of imagined radical independence and won't likely help us return to a comfortable level of interdependence. We need to become part of a small community, a good neighbor, an active citizen, a participant in the life we are living. Then and when I have your back and you have mine we can begin to trust one another again.

B