How I Got Where I Am Now; Who Joins Communities

Today I went to the park, and just rested in my car seat. I felt like taking a nap, but I wanted to see what would happen if I took a nap someplace else instead of in the still-moldy apartment. I've kept the windows open, and the air is much better than it was in the winter, but it's still not really healthy in here. I've been apartment hunting, but haven't made much progress yet. But at least I've started.

I didn't fall asleep, but I lay there meditating and thinking for a while. (The grammar people might get me for 'lay,' since I'm not sure how to use the past tense and all that. Did I lie down, or lay something down? In the past or the present? Oh well. Then the discussion will get into what exactly I mean by 'lay,' and it will end up in the gutter. After noticing that, the phrase 'laid off' became a problem too.) I actually felt much better after resting in the car even though I didn't fall asleep, since the air was fresher there.

While meditating, I was looking for my target audience. I had read an interesting article about communities at http://www.ic.org/pnp/culturediversity.php. There's a long way to go before I start a real permanent community - it's easier to start informal, temporary groups of people for a purpose, but people can easily leave whenever they want. But I still want to think now about what kind of permanent community (one that owns land) I would like to create. I value racial diversity, but from everything I've read about intentional communities, they usually attract educated, white, wealthy liberals, and not much else. There are reasons why. (By the way, I WON'T be sending my children to college. I'll talk about that later.)

That article talked about 'white people.' There are some negative stereotypes of white people. I agree with some of them. (I grew up in an all-white community, which had only one black man, by himself, in the whole neighborhood. My school was the same way - hundreds of white kids, and ONE black kid who was there for a year or two. I did not grow up with racial diversity.) There are reasons why 'white people' are the way they are. Lack of community is one reason. Other ethnic groups and immigrants tend to have larger, extended families that stay together. Caucasians in the USA tend to send children off to college, and they might never return to their original home. Then they start a small, nuclear family, with two kids, and no other relatives nearby, because they live in whatever place has offered them a job after college.

So I looked at the pattern today. People go through high school, then graduate. Some of them go away to college, but they all go to different colleges, not the same ones. They go to college because they believe that a college degree guarantees they will have job security forever, and will have a chance to become more wealthy, and to get more enjoyable jobs (like computer programming instead of floor-mopping). A few people stay home in the place where they grew up. They might get training at a vocational school, or they get a high school diploma, and get a job locally.

Some graduate from college, and then get a job either near the college, in the college, or some random place which might be far away, in yet another town where they've never lived. So, many people from high school leave and then scatter across the world. Some people stay, some people return to their home town, but not everybody.

I've decided that college doesn't guarantee job security in a collapsing economy where almost EVERYBODY gets laid off every couple years, or else they could only find jobs that were intended to be temporary from the beginning (this was named 'the gig economy' in an article I read). Businesses go bankrupt, new businesses start up, and then they go bankrupt too. College puts you tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars in debt. Then you are trying to pay off your debt, and also your new house, and your car, and then you get laid off - and maybe you've just started a family and had some kids. This is not a stable, secure lifestyle.

I am not quite in the 'stayed home' category, and I'm not in the 'college graduate' category. I went to college, but dropped out. I'm intelligent enough to succeed at school, but there were a few problems. I was chronically ill - I had sleep apnea and chronic fatigue even when I was younger, but I didn't have a name for it back then. I am food-sensitive and chemical-sensitive ADHD. And on top of that, I was probably being attacked back then, but didn't know it.

And I was disappointed with college - I felt as though they weren't teaching me anything useful, anything directly applicable to jobs. It would be all right to learn abstract theories, if the abstract theories were actually TRUE and ACCURATE, but it turns out that they were teaching me a lot of garbage there, too (economics, for instance, was all John Maynard Keynes, and nothing else, no Ludwig von Mises or any others advocating 'sound money.' Back then, I had not read a lot of the books I've read now, so I could only vaguely explain 'something seems wrong with this,' but I didn't know what. A lot of people feel that way in college, but they don't know how to describe it except 'this is nothing like the real world.')

So I ended up in State College because I needed a place to live after dropping out of college. I stayed at my brother's apartment for a while, since he had been going to Penn State, before he moved away. Then I went into grocery store and fast food jobs. Those jobs don't last forever either, and I've had problems keeping a job for a long time, usually because of illnesses.

I noticed that my friend Peter has almost exactly the same life pattern. He didn't grow up here. I think he was from New York originally, but I forget - I'd have to ask him which place he lived first, because he's lived a couple places. He also has a chronic illness, was disillusioned with school, dropped out, lived in several different places, and has had a hard time getting and keeping a job due to his illness.

Going to college seems to be the main reason why 'white people' don't stay together and get a sense of community. Some people do stay in their home towns, but lots of them leave. 'Nonwhite people' are also going to college and leaving their hometowns, but I am referring to the groups of immigrants and other people they talked about in that article, where other cultures tend to have extended families and they stay together. I can't explain it now, because it's starting to sound as though I'm saying that only white people go to college, and that's not what I'm saying. You'd have to read the article to get a better explanation. I'm thinking of places where a whole section of the city is some particular ethnic group, and they all know each other, and work together, and sell things locally, and perhaps speak a different language, and have interrelated families.

But it really is true that for some reason, only college-educated, wealthy white people seem to be interested in forming certain kinds of intentional communities, and I wanted to know why. And I agree with the criticisms of those communities. I'm anti-vegetarian, after thinking really carefully about it and researching it over a period of years - I actively oppose vegetarianism. (What I mean is, I don't go around arguing with vegetarians, but rather, I have a strong opinion about it, and I will REQUIRE an omnivorous diet as part of my lifestyle for me and my children.) Many of the nonwhite ethnic groups were not comfortable about switching to vegan/vegetarian diets to live in some of the ecovillages that require it. I also have read Julian Simon, and so I disagree with a lot of 'environmentalist' beliefs and practices. I am not all that interested in building my house out of recycled plastic, for instance. In fact, after what I've experienced with my white plastic dental fillings, I'd like to stay as far away from plastic as I can. Sometimes I kind of cringe uncomfortably, thinking of how some people are trying very hard to be environmentally moral and ethical, but I don't think they're doing anything good, they're just entertaining themselves - building houses out of recycled plastic is one of those things that seems to be good-intentioned but not useful or helpful.

It also occurred to me that I stopped celebrating Christmas. One complaint about Christmas, in 'The Trouble With Christmas,' was that other ethnic groups and other religions do not want to be surrounded by Christmas for a whole month and to be forced to join in and see it and hear it everywhere. Christmas is usually the 'one little thing' that people can't bear to give up. They just cannot bear to stop celebrating Christmas completely. They might cut back a little, or a lot, and not give hundreds of dollars of gifts, putting their credit cards into debt for the next several months - some people are able to reduce their Christmas spending, but don't want to stop altogether. So, that would be important if it were a spiritual or religious intentional community, and nonwhite, non-American ethnic groups were expected to celebrate holidays together with Christmas-celebrating Americans.

So I was looking at myself and why I don't fit in to this community - the existing local community, the 'everybody' community, this local place, State College PA. My beliefs and lifestyle are drastically different from those of almost everyone I know, but they are also drastically different from the beliefs of the people from my original community back home. So I don't have anyplace on earth where a whole lot of people living in one location all agree with my most important beliefs. (People will never agree about every detail, but they can agree about the most important things.) So I was thinking about how to find and communicate with like-minded people, and they will be people who don't feel connected with their home community, people who might have been college educated (but maybe not), people who are frustrated with voting, the media, the educational system, the money system, businesses... there are lots of things going wrong in modern culture.

If you want a feeling of control over your life, then you can build your own intentional community, or join an existing one, where you can be near people who agree with you, and you can participate in decisions that affect you locally. You won't have to get all worked up over a vote, only to find that your side loses again and again, with a 49%/51% close race. Or, your side wins, but nothing changes anyway. (Or, you could be voting for somebody who only gets 0.5% of the vote. Yippee.) We still can't do anything about national laws, like the income tax. But you can control local decisions and local community rules.

So I understand a little bit more about who tends to join intentional communities and why. If you want to attract particular target audiences, you have to offer them something they don't already have. They might give up something in exchange for living in an intentional community, but they gain something which is worth much more.