Quotes About Community

Daddy Was a Numbers Runner by Louise Meriwether is the story of Francie Coffin, who is growing up in the spirit-deadening ghettos of Harlem in the 1930s, in a family struggling to survive intact.

We have made cities out of our suburbs, and now, with the corporate drift form urban centers, are beginning to make suburbs out of our cities.

Rhythms. You can almost feel them on suburban streets, divine the hour of the day without consulting a clock from the sounds heard in the cool, leafy neighborhoods.

As cities were melting pots in the nineteenth century, suburbs have become the twentieth-century equivalent...minorities, refugees and other population subgroups have ...entered the suburbs.

So that's what we're about then, I said. Staying safe in our gated-community faith, where we make room for God. Well, you know what? It's a fantasy and a lie.

We formed the fellowship of the ring when we should've all just gone on medication

From all of us Scarborough girls, greetings and thanks. This task required two, working together, trusting each other. It required the us, not the I. For that is true love, is it not?

We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented society' to a 'person-oriented society.

These two trends—the decline of communal institutions and the expansion of corporate brands in our culture—have had an inverse, seesaw-like relationship to one another over the decades: as the influence of those institutions that provided us with that essential sense of belonging went down, the power of commercial brands went up.

In early 2013, I came across a speech by Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and educator Leanne Simpson, in which she describes her people's teachings and governance structures like this: "Our systems are designed to promote more life.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other. When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?

If we rebuild our communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism (and while we're at it, we might even spend less time producing and editing our personal brands on social media).

During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing "activists" and "regular people" became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone.

Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of the people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be such a bad thing. Put another way, if there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered communities, this is it.

Instead of helping people here, providing shelters here, bringing more generator power to the places that need them, getting the electric system up and running, they're encouraging people to leave instead.

The universal experience of living through a great shock is the feeling of being completely powerless: in the face of awesome forces, parents lose their ability to save their children, spouses are separated, homes - places of protection - become death traps. The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping - having the right to be part of a communal recovery.

We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we're really talking about, if we're honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet.

And the real surprise, for all involved, is that we are so much more than we have been told we are - that we long for more and in that longing have more company than we ever imagined.

la crise du climat pourrait susciter un sursaut citoyen, une secousse venue de la base, capable de répartir le pouvoir entre les mains du plus grand nombre et d'élargir considérablement le domaine des biens communs, lesquels cesseraient ainsi d'être vendus au plus offrant, morceau par morceau.

Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us."28

We are looking to [corporate] brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

To build a truly inclusive movement, there needs to be a truly inclusive vision that starts with and is led by the most brutalized and excluded.

Superstorm Sandy, meanwhile, has been a windfall for New Jersey real estate developers who have received millions for new construction in lightly damaged areas, while it continues to be a nightmare for those living in hard-hit public housing, much as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina played out in New Orleans.10

Rather than allowing subway and bus fares to rise while service erodes, we need to be lowering prices and expanding services—regardless of the costs. Public