Another Mainstay In The Fabric Of Community Life Is Pulled Apart

Simply because a skill can't be compensated the way it used to be. And it really doesn't matter how "objectively" necessary the particular skill in question is, or of how much training had to go into attaining it. The mere fact that it was part of the community; that it allowed significant segments of that community feel like they had meaningful purpose in regards to the ability of things in general to continue, that was the truly important part. And if a community had pride in itself; how it looked, how it presented itself to the rest of the world, it wouldn't matter if it was just sweeping streets, washing dishes, or cleaning public toilets, every job would have value and respect; precisely because of the pride and the sense of everybody working together as a team.

From my perspective this needs adjustment only in the sense that nobody should be forced to stay stuck in any one of the more difficult, or untasteful, types of "chores" that a community needs to get done on a daily basis. That we all should share at least some the hard part of doing daily life, even as we might want to gravitate to the, perhaps, more interesting tasks that have the higher profiles, and garner the most attention, because of various aspects of what they are, and what they deal with.

And further, that, as an ongoing commitment, the community just naturally accepts the ever present task of making everyone generally more capable; so that learning gets seamlessly integrated into daily life as well, and not just the sitting away for a while, in some learning factory, trying to absorb new sets of skill facts for a skill you'll probably unlearn only a few short quarters later anyway; abandoned because somebody else was made desperate enough, some place else, to do it a great deal more cheaply than the people in our community can and still have a living wage in the bargain.

The bottom line then is that there just has to be a better way to preserve community. A way that allows us to define work as simply our mix of "it takes an entire village." I think I have found it. And whether it actually is, or not, hardly matters. It is, at the very least, a place to start the discussion.

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