The Sum of Light

“That’s Disneyland.”

In the years that followed, his was not a lone voice of dissent or cynicism, as others also cast the idea of collective, community-driven solutions as nebulous and naïve. These voices and their sentiments echoed in the decade that followed, years that were filled with political turmoil, social upheaval, and deep reckonings amid the global pandemic.

Indeed, the perpetual chaos and carnage of the period from 2015 to the present have taken the divides within our communities and dredged them even deeper, undermining faith in our institutions and in our ability to create a thriving, healthy society.

The scale of loss wrought by the pandemic remains unfathomable. And yet perhaps the greatest tragedy is a collective failure to acknowledge that the challenges of one individual, one family, or one community have the potential to irrevocably affect us all; that our fates rise and fall as one.

Another structural fiction laid bare by the pandemic was the myth of scarcity, a concept designed to support the status quo and the power structures within it. The response to COVID proved that resources are not an impediment. It is, instead, a question of choices and of who holds the power to make those choices about where funding flows and to whom.

During the pandemic’s first year, resources flooded into communities, often with few restrictions. Decisions about where dollars would be spent, and how, and for whom, were being made by those closest to the crisis: people in our own communities.

When the gravest danger had passed, organizations that had opened their vaults and lifted restrictions quickly reconsolidated their power, once again leaving the Sisyphean work to the CBOs and nonprofits who are always called to step in and somehow repair the breach.

It’s a pattern that comes and goes with each disaster, be it natural or man-made, and we should be more truthful in calling it out.

We find ourselves once again in urgent and consequential times, where our actions and our inactions will ripple into the future for generations, perhaps to the end of history. Once again, CBOs and nonprofits and community groups are being asked to shoulder the burdens of broken systems they neither created nor have adequate resources to address, while those who profit from those systems sit on their resources, pointing fingers of accountability at everyone but themselves.

There is now, also, a pervasive fear gathering at the edges of our collective work to build a just society. People are afraid to speak out or to stand up. What hope remains for those without power or means?

And what is the virtue of telling “feel-good” stories about our community when, for many, they seem like fantasy in the face of unremitting darkness?

To be sure, this is not a call to stick our collective heads in the sand and pretend somehow that the despair around us isn’t real. But when we allow chaos to overwhelm everything, when we only focus on the darkness, when we choose to ignore the goodness all around us because it feels naïve, we end up suppressing our deepest instinct: to do the greatest good for the greatest number.

A community is defined by more than just shared geography or shared ZIP codes. A community is defined by shared values, and by using the strength of those values to solve big problems. It also grows by moving and inspiring others to act.

We are a mimetic culture, a society that thrives on how we view ourselves in relation to others. What we see activates something within, moving us from complacency to action.

We must lift one another up with our shared stories and relentlessly point to every source of light around us, the light emanating from thousands of partners and allies—organizers, land stewards, caregivers, educators—doing all they can to create a just, healthy, and prosperous future not just for the few, but for everyone.

That’s how we will illuminate the way forward, how we will show that hope is all around us if we simply look for it in the dark.