Thoughts on isolation and community

Reading about court challenges to drug testing in students, it again occurs to me that these issues arise because we have split from community, isolated ourselves and created huge “cities” that isolate our children such that we can’t tell when they’re using drugs, because we don’t spend enough time with them.
The kids grow up without a community of adults who care about them and who talk to each other, sharing wisdom and observation about the kids. I know some teachers still do this, and do it well, but they will be the first to tell you it’s an uphill struggle with the setup of the schools. No one person, no matter how much they care, has the energy or wisdom to help a struggling teen; it takes a community. We form teams, which are attempts at temporary communities with specific goals, but the limits on knowing our teammates limits our ability to act meaningfully in the lives of kids.

A related issue is our attempts to isolated ourselves from the effects of others’ behaviors (including teen drug use). It becomes a vicious cycle: we no longer know our neighbors, and therefore their behavior seems random to us, so we isolate further, require that our neighbors not impact us in any way, which is impossible, so their behavior, which may seem more frightening because we don’t understand them, continues to impact us, we make more laws, etc.

The only way to break this cycle is to form smaller communities again; risk knowing your neighbors and spending enough time with them so that their behavior does not seem so unpredictable to you. Have schools small enough that teachers know their pupils and don’t need testing to see when they are acting drugged; random drug testing then isn’t needed.

Accountability without caring doesn’t work. Think of yourself and of who you feel accountable to -- the ones we really feel we owe our best behavior to are the ones we care about, and who we know care about us. Fear-based accountability only works as well as its police-ability; once the authority’s “eyes” are not glancing our way, how many of us continue to uphold the rules exactly? (Those who do, I believe, are actually holding themselves accountable to their community of loved ones, in the sense of not wanting to let them down, or to see themselves as less than worthy of that love.)

We have had a least one generation’s worth of “quick fixes” that haven’t worked. Laws, experts, time-limited emotion-management groups -- none of them connect us to each other. It’s time to explore the more difficult but ultimately more deeply effective process of re-connecting with the people in our lives by creating smaller, more stable communities and schools. And by slowing down and taking time to get to know a smaller group but know them well.