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solidarity
6 Reasons for Communitarian Living
As disasters become more frequent and politics destabilizes, it feels more important than ever to live connected to other people.
Apr 13, 2025
This spring my husband and I are moving three tenths of a mile and 200 years back in time.
We are moving from our super-energy-efficient, passive solar home built in 2001 to a farmhouse built in 1800. (And looking for someone to buy the cozy green home we raised our family in. Check it out here and spread the word!) We are excited to have more space to share with extended family. And, we will have a project on our hands! Regaining some of the features we are leaving behind—heat pumps, PV, a composting toilet, and more—will take time. A fun and satisfying challenge we hope!
The great news is that we will still be part of the experiment we have participated in for almost 30 years: Cobb Hill Cohousing, a multi-generational community of 23 families in Vermont’s Connecticut River Valley. The house we are moving to is located within Cobb Hill, just a bit further from the cluster of houses we’ve called home.
We will still share 280 acres of farm and forest and participate in community celebrations and decision-making. We’ll still have neighbors to help and to rely on. We’ll still have maple syrup, eggs, flowers, herbs, vegetables, milk, and cheese all produced by our neighbors on our shared land. We’ll have learning companions to navigate alongside in an increasingly destabilized world.
No one knows how to live sustainably and equitably in our current society or how to prepare for coming climate shocks. So we need to learn. And learning is faster with more minds in the mix.
A big move like ours prompts reflection. We had to move, but we didn’t want to go anywhere else. Here are six reasons that came to mind when we paused to ask ourselves why.
- People: As disasters become more frequent and politics destabilizes, it feels more important than ever to live connected to other people. People who can be there in an emergency or help make sense of the tumult. But not just people, these specific people. We are connected to our neighbors by shared work, shared fun, and shared history. We are watching their children grow up and hopefully adding something to those kid’s lives. These are the people who brought soup when I broke my ankle, who loaned me a walker to get to the ER, who visited and cheered me up. These are the people I want to bring soup to when they need it!
- Land: There’s the pleasure of coming to know a piece of land deeply. Of walking its paths in spring and summer and skiing them in winter. Of watching for the return of familiar birds and wildflowers with each season. There’s also the work and joys of stewardship, of seeing a once over-harvested forest slowly return to good health. And, by putting most of our shared land under permanent conservation easement and making it open to our neighbors for enjoyment, we find ways to share these gifts now and into the future, which is its own kind of satisfaction.
- Learning: No one knows how to live sustainably and equitably in our current society or how to prepare for coming climate shocks. So we need to learn. And learning is faster with more minds in the mix. We took three tries to get a PV system at Cobb Hill. I led the first two, which ran aground. Then Sandy came in with new determination and a new path in mind. Every day when I walk past the solar-panel-covered barns I think about all three tries, how my “failures” and Sandy’s fresh eyes cracked the code. I think about the need to reinvent community meals after they paused for the pandemic (thanks Audrey!) or the need to wire EV charging ports on infrastructure that didn’t anticipate them (thanks Jesse!) And so on. We have a lot to learn at this moment in human history, but we don’t have to do it alone!
- Food: There’s the taste of a fresh strawberry or an ear of corn moving from field to plate in five minutes. Then there’s the satisfaction of growing some of what you eat and knowing the people who grew more of it. In these times when the federal government’s ability to keep the food system safe is faltering, there’s also peace of mind in seeing at least part of the supply chain right outside your door.
- Resilience: From the connections between good people, a well-loved bit of land, the capacity to learn, and the capacity to grow at least some food comes something bigger than any piece alone. It’s the capacity to cope. It is, hopefully, the capacity to help each other and offer support to wider circles when surprises come and the pace of change speeds up.
- A link to the future: Many have passed through Cobb Hill. Some stayed for a growing season, some for their childhood, some for the length of a learning program. They’ve moved on to start (or join) other communities, farms, nonprofits. I like to think they’ve all taken something with them, a new skill, a lesson in what NOT to do, a belief that dreams can become physical stuff. Maybe in the end that’s the main reward of trying to do things differently—the encouragement to others that they can create the possibilities they see.
Cobb Hill isn’t the only way to find these six things, thank goodness. You’ll find them in smaller groups and larger ones, in cities, in the tropics, on the coast. In this time of transition and reflection in my own family, I hope that knowing they exist in one place might make it easier for you to imagine (or create) them elsewhere, too.
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The Lessons of Covid-19 and Its Long Haul: We Need Community Care
As Trump further weakens public health infrastructure, let us renew our attention to keeping each other safe, supporting the most vulnerable among us, and preventing more mass disablement.
Apr 10, 2025
The Trump administration’s decision to close the Heath and Human Services Office of Long COVID Research and Practice deals yet another blow to our already embattled public health system. This initiative, like the recently terminated Advisory Committee on Long COVID, had signaled much-needed attention to infection-associated chronic diseases, largely overlooked by the U.S. medical establishment.
An estimated 7.5% of adults in the United States suffer from Long Covid, which can affect multiple organ systems with over 200 symptoms from brain fog and sleep problems to joint pain and bedridden fatigue. A diagnosis of Long Covid describes symptoms that continue at least three months after contracting Covid-19. For some, symptoms eventually go away. But for others, symptoms get worse and, frighteningly, new symptoms appear—with no end in sight. Long Covid is variable and unpredictable. I know this because it happened to me.
Covid-19 laid bare our fragile health systems and the necessity of caring for one another.
After escaping Covid-19 for over three years, I developed a moderate case, with fever, cough, body ache, and fatigue. Four months later, when I had almost complete recovered, I suddenly took a turn for the worse. Over the past 15 months I have steadily improved, yet my life remains significantly changed. Aches and pains, post-exertional malaise, and a weakened immune system circumscribe my daily activities. Alongside the challenges of navigating the health conditions themselves is my limited ability to keep Covid-safe amid waning attention to Covid-19—as our government and institutions have abandoned Covid precautions. This puts us all at higher risk of Covid-19 infection, and for those of us with Long Covid this risk is exacerbated—each additional reinfection with Covid exposes us to further complications with Long Covid.
In such a climate of pandemic abandonment, punctuated as early as 2022 when then-President Joe Biden issued his dangerously delusional statement that we were post-pandemic, we can rely even less than before on our government and institutions to save us from either Covid-19 or Long Covid. We must prioritize cultivating our own spaces of care—focusing on prevention, mutual aid, and accommodations for the sick and disabled.
We Need to Cultivate Spaces of Collective Care
The earliest lessons of the pandemic remain true today—we can lower transmission rates through masking, physical distancing, and meeting online, among other precautions. While workplaces, businesses, and public spaces have varied in their implementation of Covid-19 safety, social justice groups, led by disability justice, have led the way from the start.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, my racial justice collective applied our principles of care and justice to Covid-19 safety. We pivoted meetings and gatherings online to Zoom, made use of its breakout rooms for one-on-one debriefs, the chat box for running insights and snark, and the emoji feature for added interpersonal expressiveness. As we learned new ways to build community, it made us more inclusive: Folks who otherwise had barriers to attending in-person—whether that be due to illness and disability or just being out-of-town—could now attend remotely. When gatherings needed to be in-person, like the summer 2020 protests for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we still prioritized Covid-19 precautions. Actions either followed traditional modes of large gatherings but required (and provided) masks, or were smaller so that activists could maintain physical distance. For those who couldn’t participate safely due to Covid-19 or physical disability, remote action was possible, such as handling back-end prep work or coordinating check-ins.
These community care practices remain important even during periods of low community transmission—they make spaces accessible to all.
We Must Hold Ourselves Accountable
Five years into the pandemic, even progressive activist groups have moved away from these lessons. Many no longer require masks at meetings and gatherings, or prioritize online options. This leaves each of us to fend for ourselves individually, abandoning the principles of collective care and disability justice—from access intimacy to “we keep us safe”—that had made such in-roads in our communities. If we cannot collectively learn from this “mass disabling event” of our lifetime, when will we? And if progressive activist groups whose common mission it is to make a world free from oppression—where caring for one another is the dominant ethos—ditch pandemic precautions, what hope is there?
To be sure, we still need to push institutions at the local and federal levels to make available personal protective equipment and resources for frontline workers, better access to healthcare, more research on Long Covid and other underfunded chronic conditions such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). These actions would certainly help support the many biomedical doctors who toil tirelessly for treatments despite biomedicine’s limited approaches to chronic illness, as well as the Chinese medicine and other non-biomedicine doctors, not to mention the patient advocacy groups, who have arguably carried the bulk of the care and treatment for Long Covid sufferers.
I believe we have the most control over our small communities of care. Covid-19 laid bare our fragile health systems and the necessity of caring for one another—and for a time many of us heeded that call. Let us renew our attention to keeping each other safe, supporting the most vulnerable among us, and preventing more mass disablement. And for us activists who say we want to create better worlds, let’s model for everyone else how it’s done.
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In the Mess of Our National Disaster, Can We Find the Seeds to Renew Democracy?
History suggests that disaster not only destroys—it also disrupts. It crushes old assumptions, forcing people to see one another, to respond, to rebuild.
Apr 09, 2025
In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a stark warning: America is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, and the consequences are dire. “If we fail to [address this crisis], we will pay an ever-increasing price in the form of our individual and collective health and well-being,” he wrote. Then came the line that now feels prophetic: “We will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.”
This country is certainly dividing, and whether it can stand remains to be seen. As an immigrant from apartheid-era South Africa and a Californian shaken by the fires, I love and fear for the country I have known as home since adolescence. Having grown up in a society fractured by systemic oppression and seeing firsthand how division and authoritarianism hollow out a nation, I recognize the peril America faces. Trump and his allies have solidified their hold on power, reshaping institutions to entrench minority rule, while political violence moves from the fringes to the mainstream. State leaders openly defy court rulings, and democratic backsliding is no longer a theoretical threat but a lived reality. The consequences stretch far beyond our borders, fueling global instability.
Given everything at stake—from escalating climate disasters to an economy teetering on crisis—many are wondering: Are we entirely lost?
No, I say. It’s disastrous, yes. But it is precisely in the disastrous that we may find the seeds of renewal.
We now have a choice: Succumb to panic, numbness, and doomscrolling; or take purposeful action by confronting disaster head-on.
The reality is that democracy has been eroding for years; climate disruption worsens daily. The difference now is that we can no longer ignore the truth of our situation. Mass deportations. The rise of authoritarianism. A looming constitutional crisis. Wildfires, hurricanes, bomb cyclones, rising sea levels. The unraveling is no longer theoretical. It is here.
And this recognition could be our saving grace.
Murthy’s warning underscores the link between personal loneliness, social fragmentation, and political chaos. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The isolation of atomized individuals provides the mass basis for totalitarian rule.” Contemporary research supports her argument. A 2021 RAND Corporation study found loneliness is a primary driver for adopting extremist views and joining extremist groups. A 2022 study published in Political Psychology found that weak social bonds correlate with lower voter turnout and increased support for populist parties.
In this context, the disastrous might offer an unexpected antidote.
Charles Fritz, a sociologist who helped lead the University of Chicago’s Disaster Research Project in the 1950s, analyzed a broad data set of catastrophic events and concluded: “The widespread sharing of danger, loss, and deprivation produces an intimate, primary group solidarity among the survivors, which overcomes social isolation, provides a channel for intimate communication and expression, and provides a major source of physical and emotional support and reassurance.” There is ample further evidence to back up his conclusion, as Rebecca Solnit documents at length in A Paradise Built in Hell.
We are wired to adapt to slow declines, to normalize the unraveling. But disaster shatters the illusion of stability. It forces a reckoning. History suggests that disaster not only destroys—it also disrupts. It crushes old assumptions, forcing people to see one another, to respond, to rebuild.
Most of us aren’t living in an actual disaster zone right now. But when we see images of Los Angeles burning, Asheville flooding, or state officials openly defying the rule of law, we feel the urgency of the moment.
We now have a choice: Succumb to panic, numbness, and doomscrolling; or take purposeful action by confronting disaster head-on. This isn’t just about responding to immediate crises, but about addressing the isolation and division that have fueled them. By acting with intention, we don’t just face disaster—we undo the fragmentation that made it possible.
Growing up under apartheid, I learned how systems of oppression function and how they fail. I saw firsthand that division is not inevitable, that transformation is possible—but only when people refuse to be passive in the face of crisis. Former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln understood this too. “We are not enemies, but friends,” he declared in his first inaugural address in 1861, on the eve of national collapse. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” Those bonds of affection, Lincoln said, could be rekindled by the “better angels of our nature.” He knew then what we must remember now: Survival depends on rebuilding these bonds.
Regardless of how our political situation unfolds, we are entering an era of massive upheaval, and none of us will remain untouched. Whether through fire, flood, or political collapse, displacement is no longer a distant threat—it is a certainty.
Can you feel it? The disaster at your doorstep?
Let it inspire you to act. Talk to the neighbor who voted red. Reach out to your friends. Volunteer with organizations fighting for justice. Host a community discussion, support local activism, or donate to causes that uplift marginalized communities. Advocate for change by calling your representatives. Support artists and thinkers who challenge the status quo. Every action—big or small—helps rebuild what’s been broken.
Let the better angels of our nature prevail. It’s the only way forward.
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