Building community in unlikely places

Mindful Metropolis, May issue

Sheet cake and punch. The Star Spangled Banner playing from a soldier’s iPod, and a 10-minute speech by a colonel from Fort Benning, Ga., who no one had ever heard of, using words that sounded like they were ripped right out of Donald Rumsfeld’s playbook.

That’s how the United States Army honored nearly 200 soldiers — my sister’s boyfriend among them — at a going away party last month on a base in rural Wisconsin. They were then shipped off to Iraq for 12 months of mop-up duty in a supposedly clean war gone dirty…a war that our President and the national media tell us will end soon.

Waiting in the line for sheet cake after the speech (it ran out before everyone got a piece), I watched a young mother place her baby into the father’s arms, while a look of disbelief on his face may have suggested that he was more prepared to clear a road of Improvised Explosive Devices than he was for this. The infant’s soft cheeks rubbing against camouflage green.

A war tears apart communities, both in the country where the bombs fall and the tanks leave their treads, and also at home, where the soldiers leave behind jobs, families and newborn babies, for months, years, sometimes lifetimes. There’s nothing new about that observation. Wars have been tearing apart communities since long before gunpowder was invented.

What has surprised me during this family crisis of ours is how my sister has found community in the most unlikely of places. Let me explain. We are progressives, my sister, my parents, and I. We prefer decisions that are based on sound, rational thinking, not emotion and fear. We favor independent thoughts rather than automatically repeating what a government, military or church has told us to believe. And so we opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and those who perpetrated the war. But rather than seek out and engage the flag-waving, pro-war crowd, we usually avoided them, out of anger, resentment and humiliation over our government’s actions.

Suddenly my sister found herself falling in love with a Minnesota boy in the Army Reserves. Like her, he is progressive, rational, independent, caring and beautiful. (He also idolizes Bob Dylan playing an acoustic guitar.) Yet he made a Faustian bargain with the military, prior to 9/11, in order to pay for college. He served a 13-month deployment in Iraq early in the war, emerged unscathed, and that was supposed to be it. But last summer he received stop-loss orders from the Pentagon, sending him back to the Middle East days after his contract was to have expired.

My sister is now an army wife (though she doesn’t yet have a ring on her finger) and spends two Sunday evenings a month with other women in the Twin Cities who have also been deprived of a partner for the next year. They cook meals together, share stories, watch the Lifetime series “Army Wives,” and try to laugh. She’s grateful for their companionship and maintains that these women understand her situation in a way that our parents, her best friend and I never will, even though she hasn’t known them long. Yet she admits that she never would have sought out these confidants had it not been for her boyfriend’s deployment. And she doesn’t know if she’ll remain close with them once he comes home.

In troubled times like these, it seems many of us seek community in unlikely places. Take an April 9 New York Times story, for example, about homeless Americans banding together, or seeking help from advocacy groups like Take Back the Land to re-claim and occupy foreclosed, vacant homes.

The inaugural issue of this publication is itself the result of a community teaming up to dig a valuable and trusted local magazine out of the ashes after it was torched by a corporate media baron far from Chicago, and will need community support if it’s to survive.

Before this painful recession ends, we may all join new communities in unlikely places. It might be with a group of army wives. It might be at a food pantry or a bread line. Or, it might even be helping a homeless family break into an empty, foreclosed home.

Jacob Wheeler is a former assistant editor at In These Times magazine.