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Belonging Revolution: October 13, 2018 with Guest Professor Neil Gross

With the weather changing Public Safety Chief Mike Butler and Dan Benavidez have become fair weather walkers. The duo only contact residents that they see on the street so the warmer weather is an important part.

This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

With the weather changing Public Safety Chief Mike Butler and Dan Benavidez have become fair weather walkers. The duo only contact residents that they see on the street so the warmer weather is an important part. The following are the letters written by Benavidez, Butler, and their guest Professor Neil Gross of Colby College, Maine.

Dan Benavidez's Perspective

The weather for the past several weekends has not been nice for us to do our Sunday neighborhood walks and Sunday the 14th looked no better and for sure it was snowy and cold. However Chief Mike Butler called me last week and told me “Dan let’s do our neighborhood walk this coming Saturday the 13th it may be a bit chilly but the sun will be out, we will meet at the mobile home complex on South Francis Street, Professor Neil Gross from Colby College in the State of Maine will join us” this is the same neighborhood where recently a brother killed his sibling brother.

We had walked in this neighborhood not too long ago and I realized once again the importance of going back to revisit neighborhoods, especially after a tragedy had occurred there. And this was a very pleasant walk with many neighbors out into the sunshine. And in a true sense of making our neighbors (that be all of us) feel we belong, Mike met and shared with the neighbors and making them know that for sure they belong in our great Longmont City. And I chuckled when I said to a lady “Hi I would like you to meet Mike Butler the Longmont Chief of Police and Fire Department”, and our conversation began, and she smiled when she told us “I thought what is this about? In affect what have I done” and a very nice sharing conversation ensued.

We had met several of the neighbors before like Marylin who recalled our last visit with her and was so nice to us and she shared with us an issue she had with a neighbor and indeed we visited her neighbor a very nice mainly Spanish speaking lady and Mike worked out the issue with her with no problema. Walla! For sure our belonging Revolution works! This neighbored is a low income neighborhood and a good example of Longmont’s true Inclusivism, as it has about a 50% Latino population and the neighbors all getting along so good and of course why should the not as this is inclusive Longmont, Colorado. “The below article about the scourge of loneliness in our society by a national syndicated columnist gives rise to the great need for a Belonging Revolution all over our country!’

And Professor Neil Gross thank you very much for joining us on our walk! You for sure know what its all about to make us feel we all belong!

Thank you

Dan Benavidez

Our epidemic of loneliness

WASHINGTON — If Sen. Ben Sasse is right — he has not recently been wrong about anything important — the nation’s most discussed political problem is entangled with the least-understood public health problem. The political problem is furious partisanship. The public health problem is loneliness. Sasse’s new book argues that Americans are richer, more informed and “connected” than ever — and unhappier, more isolated and less fulfilled.

In “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal,” Sasse’s subject is “the evaporation of social capital” — the satisfactions of work and community. This reflects a perverse phenomenon: What has come to count as connectedness is displacing the real thing. And matters might quickly become dramatically worse.

Loneliness in “epidemic proportions” is producing a “loneliness literature” of sociological and medical findings about the effect of loneliness on individuals’ brains and bodies, and on communities. Sasse says “there is a growing consensus” that loneliness — not obesity, cancer or heart disease — is the nation’s “number one health crisis.” “Persistent loneliness” reduces average longevity more than twice as much as does heavy drinking and more than three times as much as obesity, which often is a consequence of loneliness. Research demonstrates that loneliness is as physically dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and contributes to cognitive decline, including more rapid advance of Alzheimer’s disease. Sasse says, “We’re literally dying of despair,” of the failure “to fill the hole millions of Americans feel in their lives.”

Symptoms large and small are everywhere. Time was, Sasse notes, Americans “stocked their imaginations with the same things“: In the 1950s, frequently 70 percent of television sets in use tuned in to “I Love Lucy.” Today, when 93 percent of Americans have access to more than 500 channels, the most-watched cable news program, “Hannity” has about 1 percent of the U.S. population. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the average number of times Americans entertained at home declined almost 50 percent. Americans are hyperconnected but disconnected, with “fewer non-virtual friends than at any point in decades.” With the median American checking (according to a Pew survey) a smartphone every 4.3 minutes, and with nearly 40 percent of those 18 to 29 online almost every waking minute, we are “addicted to distraction” and “parched for genuine community.” Social media, those “tendrils of resentment” that Sasse calls accelerants for political anger, create a nuance-free “outrage loop” for “professional rage-peddlers.” And for people for whom enemies have the psychic value of giving life coherence.

Work, which Sasse calls “arguably the most fundamental anchor of human identity,” is at the beginning of “a staggering level of cultural disruption” swifter and more radical than even America’s transformation from a rural and agricultural to an urban and industrial nation. At that time, one response to social disruption was alcoholism, which begat Prohibition. Today, one reason the average American life span has declined for three consecutive years is that many more are dying of drug overdoses — one of the “diseases of despair” — annually than died during the entire Vietnam War. People “need to be needed,” but McKinsey & Co. analysts calculate that, globally, 50 percent of paid activities — jobs — could be automated by currently demonstrated technologies. America’s largest job category is “driver” and, with self-driving vehicles coming, two-thirds of such jobs could disappear in a decade.

This future of accelerating flux exhilarates the educated and socially nimble. It frightens those who, their work identities erased and their communities atomized, are tempted not by what Sasse calls “healthy local tribes” but by political tribalism of grievances, or by chemical oblivion, or both. In today’s bifurcated nation, 2016 was the 10th consecutive year when 40 percent of American children were born outside of marriage, America has “two almost entirely different cultures,” exemplified by this: Under 10 percent of births to college-educated women are outside of marriage compared to almost 70 percent of births to women with high school diplomas or less.

Repairing America’s physical infrastructure, although expensive, is conceptually simple, involving steel and concrete. The crumbling of America’s social infrastructure presents a daunting challenge: We do not know how to develop what Sasse wants, “new habits of mind and heart ... new practices of neighborliness.” We do know that more government, which means more saturation of society with politics, is not a sufficient answer.

Sasse, a fifth-generation Nebraskan who dedicates his book to the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs and other little platoons of Fremont, Nebraska (population 26,000), wants to rekindle the “hometown-gym-on-a-Friday-night feeling.” But Americans can’t go home again to Fremont.

George Will

Washington Post

Mike’s Perspective

Dan and I, joined by Professor Neil Gross from Colby College in Maine, chose to walk a neighborhood that experienced a tragedy a couple of weeks ago when one brother killed his sibling brother. These two brothers lived together. And again, we often select neighborhoods that have recently experienced distress. This particular neighborhood is the St. Vrain Mobile Home Park, a park of approximately one hundred mobile homes. A few of those we met expressed their sorrow in the course of our conversation.

Six people we met accepted our invitation to become more involved in our community. As a side note, Longmont Public Safety has an agreement with Foothills United Way. In essence, Foothills United Way will take the names and contact information from those who accept our invitation and recontact those people to determine what they would like to volunteer for. I often mention that we need assistance with people who are struggling with addiction, their mental health and homelessness.

We have a list of over one thousand people who have accepted our invitation! What we have learned in our 180 plus walks is that people do have skills, resources, expertise and gifts to offer the rest of us and they, very importantly, want to make an offering of their skills, resources, expertise and gifts - often they just don’t know how. We have designed a system and process for that to happen. Thanks to Foothills United Way, Doug Yeiser and his staff!

Those we met for the most part seemed very happy and content and expressed those sentiments. A few mentioned issues with people struggling with homelessness; one person expressed concerns about a home built fireplace that seemed dangerous and one person expressed her dissatisfaction with police response to the homeless concerns and a former roommate who she believes stole from her. Fire will contact residents of the mobile home with the not-to-code fireplace and Police will respond to the issues of homelessness in and around the mobile home park.

Many people within the mobile home park knew of the slaying that occurred two weeks ago. In spite of that, almost everyone we spoke to expressed feeling safe and secure in the neighborhood. Again, as a side note, 95% of the violence that occurs in our community happens between people who love each other, know each other or live together. So when people ask me is it safe to live in Longmont I respond, “It depends who you live with.”

A word about neighborhood abundancy and intimacy - and perhaps a way of addressing the loneliness that exists in our midst.

We discover the abundance and intimacy of our neighborhoods not only when our gifts are acknowledged, but also when our sorrows are revealed. We make them public. They become neighborhood knowledge. Making our gifts and sorrows explicit makes them available for sharing. The range and variety of of the sorrows we bear gives us the fuel for intimacy in our neighborhoods and connectedness.

What this means is that neighborhood intimacy depends on our willingness to share with others what is most intimate and personal. Perhaps the task of building neighborhoods is to take the personal problems and abilities out of the closet. A single parent requests help from neighbors when their teenager has run away. A family holds a wake for family, friends and neighbors - instead of calling in bereavement specialists. A family experiences a tragedy and the whole neighborhood embraces them.

Many in our neighborhoods know our children, their gifts, their propensity to get into trouble, and there are so many eyes watching out for them. So when we disclose our “secrets” others now have the information and the know-how to use their talents to help with them. At that moment, the amazing restoration of a neighborhood begins!

In disclosing our sorrows, not only are getting help, but we are establishing a pattern for how we might deal with the human condition in our neighborhoods. Imagine placing the power to help each other in the hands and hearts of our neighbors who choose to reveal their own struggles, discuss them, imagine new possibilities, and act for the good of each person.

All by simple act of sharing our unrecognized sorrows as well as our gifts!

Professor Neil Gross, Colby College, Maine

It was a real pleasure walking this past Saturday with Mike and Dan. Longmont residents who have been reading reports of their walks over the years know how committed Mike and Dan are to the project of community engagement and outreach. What they might not know is how deep the rapport is between the two men. It didn’t take more than a minute for the affectionate jokes to start flying back and forth, with Dan telling the very tall Mike that the lack of oxygen at his altitude might be affecting his brain. As we strolled, waiting for people to wake up, come outside, and walk their dogs or tend their gardens so that we could speak to them, it dawned on me that Mike and Dan walk Longmont neighborhoods not only because they believe passionately it’s the right thing to do, but also because they enjoy each other’s company and value each other’s perspective. The residents we spoke with seemed to sense this rapport and be drawn in by it. Yes, Mike and Dan were trying to build community by connecting residents to their police department and to various opportunities for volunteering and civic engagement. And that’s great. At the same time, with their visible friendship they were modeling coming together across lines of difference (for example, police/non-police) in genuine appreciation and understanding. In these divisive times that was pretty inspiring to see.