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Lamenting our woes can be contagious. Misery certainly loves company. The media is happy to tell us all the reasons why we should be afraid. The drama of the human condition sells. There are those who easily exploit our fears of terrorism, of the urban core, of African-Americans and Latinos, of other ethnicities, of those who are poor and uneducated, of other countries. In the telling, there is a willingness to sacrifice the wholeness and dignity of a person or group for the sake of capturing the drama or emotion in the moment. There is an industry that profits from assigning blame and marketing fear and fault.
Because of my assignment and perhaps more than anyone else in our community, I know what does not go well. I see the crime, the medical emergencies, the disorder, the traffic accidents, the domestic violence, the harm done to children, and people struggling with addiction, homeless and their mental health. Becoming cynical and stuck in the quagmire of the imperfections and humanness of people would be easy.
In our Belonging Revolution walks, Dan Benavidez and I have spoken to over 2,500 people and visited over 150 neighborhoods and four different senior living facilities. The vast majority of walked neighborhoods are mobile home parks and apartment complexes. The stories people shared confirmed with certainty that the gifts, possibilities, and generosity of our community are beyond immense. Almost to the person, people speak of the abundancy in their lives. They love their neighborhood and our community. And in every single neighborhood, Dan and I have been welcomed with care and kindness.
Stories of people helping others; stories of cooperation, responsibility; stories of peoples gifts and hospitality; stories of connectedness and belonging; stories of welcoming strangers; stories of healing; stories of hope for their children; stories of kindness, forgiveness and generosity; stories of families helping other families - these are the stories we hear every Sunday morning in our community. On every walk, we find connectors, gift-centered people who see the half-full in everyone who believe in the people in our community and find joy in gathering people together.
We could go on and on about the innumerable(in the thousands) acts of kindness, generosity and selflessness we have personally documented. Here is the point. We recognize our community has deficiencies and problems. But the overpowering spotlight on what does not work or who is to blame, or the fear and fault shines so brightly that what is good only lives in the shadows. For every act of unkindness or for what does not go well, there are at least one thousand acts of kindness and selflessness! That is a fact! Don’t believe us - then we would invite you to start walking neighborhoods in our community. Meet people you have never met before. Take the chance of leaving the comfort and familiarity of your home and neighborhood and visit other neighborhoods. You will find that for every neighborhood, there is a welcome sign at its edge. You will see, as William Butler Yeats proclaimed, “There are no strangers here, just friends you haven’t yet met.”
The community we have discovered in our Belonging Revolution walks has at its center two sources of power. The first is that EVERY person has gifts to offer. The second is that people are hungry to share their gifts with the rest of us.
We often hear the safety of any community is a function of what the crime stats say. Look at Chicago. Chicagoans and the rest of the world portray and define their community by what does not go well(homicides and shootings). There are those willing to tell us stories of mayhem, fear and violence. These are stories filled with limitations and sorely lacking in possibilities. Possibility thinking is marginalized, relegated to human interest and side stories in the media. I know there are people who want to change the story that is told in Chicago. The one thousand to one ratio also applies to their community. Do we want to redefine and re-portray Chicago? Do we want to minimize the violence and the killings? What if we defined the safety of a community as a function of what goes well? What if the stories of Chicago were ones of possibilities, generosity and the gifts of their citizens? Why cant the focus be on the thousand instead of the one?
As long as the story is about the one, our stories are really fictional in nature. The decisions to tell stories about the one over and over again as if they were defining truths limits the possibilities of creating a desired future. Healing is really the re-remembering of the past in a more forgiving way. The willingness to own up to the fictional nature of our own stories is where the healing begins - and where the possibilities reside. If we want to create a future that is different than the past or the present, we will need to learn to tell stories that reflect reality. Let our mantra be “ for every bad thing that happens, there are a thousand good things that happen.”
Mike Butler
Longmont, CO
Mike Butler is Longmont's Public Safety Chief.
This is an opinion piece that was submitted to the Longmont Observer and does not necessarily represent the opinion of the Longmont Observer. If you have an opinion piece you’d like published, please visit our ‘Submit an Opinion’ page.
