I lived on a block when I was a child. There were eight homes on each side of the street. I knew everyone who lived in each house. The people who lived on the blocks around me could say the same. Today, I live in a building with ten floors and eighty apartments. There are more people in my building than once lived on my block. I only know one person by name.
Such is the society we now live in, one in which people cross paths with one another in neighborhoods where indifference and disconnection set our side-by-side isolation, a social distancing created less by a pandemic and more by the partisan perspectives and self-absorbing technology that prevents what used to be more commonplace. A special word once defined where I lived. It meant more than a location on a map, or the separation of race and class, or the confines of a confining reality.
If we are to ever live in a nation with a more perfect union, we need to recapture and reestablish how special a word it is. It was once explained to me to mean “common unity”. The entire country needs to become one “community”.
What We Landmark In Our Hearts
By Michael Tyler
There is no public park or civic hall or mall or county square
In any city, town or parish that can fill up on its own.
It takes the humanity of people and the aim of their ideals,
To populate the places inhabited by hope.
Grid lines and route signs don’t map our need to be together,
Or show the whereabouts and careabouts of what we landmark in our hearts.
And though our neighborhoods are always found in always there locations,
We yearn to live in burgs and boroughs that make a home for what we feel.
Places sectioned off and parceled by busy streets and one-lane roads,
Are marked by sign posts of belonging that point the way for kindred souls,
Who’ll dodge ditches of division and sinkholes caved by moral rot,
To reach a longed for destination they were destined all to find:
Without twisted trails or potholed paths or narrow-minded lanes,
Without empty plots and vacant lots abandoned by ill will.
A place with trusted tracks of fairness and sidewalks daily cleaned by peace,
That shuttle ordinary beings with extraordinary bonds.
And regardless of its location or designated name,
Or the people it has gathered and convened for common cause,
It is known by its allegiance as a fellowship of friends,
And why in every single language it is called “community”.