This article was submitted to Amerikaner.org by Chuck Conners. If you would like to submit your own work, please email AmerikanerContributions@proton.me
They say ” History belongs to those who show up;” as our dear friend Magnus recently opined, just having children, raising them well, and making sure they do the same, stacks the deck in our favor as we approach harder times.
But there is another component to showing up – building and participating in your community. No man is an island. Adam walked with God, Noah had his sons, we need friends and family, we need a community, and telegram and Twitter do not count. While there are often calls for joining political or ideological activism and fellowship groups, and those things are important, I want you to do one of the easiest things in the world – go talk to your neighbors!
We need to show up to take our families to our local community events, show up at the school board meetings, the Lions club pancake breakfasts, and the volenteer fire department fish fry. Join and bring your children to a local church, even if it isn’t a perfect one. If you have a business, go to the chamber of commerce meetings, even if most of your peers are TV-brained boomers. Be a part of your local community, find friends that live close to you, even if their ideology isn’t there yet, or never will be.
Many of us have dreams of moving to a neglected farmstead and being it back to life, or moving to a historic neighborhood and reviving the beauty of an old home. These are wonderful dreams of rebuilding ourselves and our nation though work and care. But when we do these things, part of it must be reaching out to our neighbors who know the history of these properties, and proving we are good caretakers of them. We can’t be like the carpetbagger, or the coastal locust, that sweeps in and ruins what once was with preconceived notions from where we came from. We have to prove that we are worthy of their community.
If you are fortunate enough to live in the same town you grew up in, you might know the names of the people who live around you, and even have shared stories of days gone by, but that isn’t engaging with them now. Leaving those relationships on the shelf is neglect – and that does nothing to enrich them or build it up.
These are the people that you will need to count on in an emergency, when the storms come and the power goes off, you can’t count on your internet friends to come over with a chainsaw and help you get a branch off your roof. Your Twitter mutuals aren’t going to keep an eye on the place so you can stay at the hospital when your children are born.
Kith and Kin, Blood and Soil, to rebuild our people we must interact with them. We need to prove our worth, prove our ideas have merit, prove our love for our communities. Become role models, and pillars of our communities. No one is going to listen to the esoteric political ravings of a childless, disheveled shut-in. Put on your pants, a decent shirt, comb your kids’ hair, and go to the church bake sale, or the local charity auction. If you don’t have a family yet, this might be how you get one. Making contacts and building local relationships with people who can introduce you to a potential wife, or even just a potential employer, who can help you get to that next rung of financial security.
Joining local social institutions doesn’t just take care of your neighbor’s immediate needs, and fulfill your need for fellowship, but it also allows you to build the alternate social structures that can carry a community through hard times, and you will have an opportunity to provide the kind of political truisms to push more and more young men on their ideological journeys. Those relationships and structures will also mean that you can help vet local political leaders, or even be elected yourself, and make sure that those seats are kept out of the hands of our enemies. We can keep our communities focused on encouraging locals to start businesses, and not using your taxes to ship in people who hate you and wish to destroy your town.
A better world might start at home, but the next step is just next door. Take some cookies to your neighbors, go to the church down the street on Sunday, and join the Thursday night bowling league.
It all starts with you.