The Common Good

The recent debate about health care reform and some words I heard recently about how there needs to be a movement toward the "common good" made me ask, "Just what is the common good?" It seems according to various sociologist that our culture has turned into one of "expressive individualism." The focus for what is valuable and what needs to be done in society is centered around "me and mine."

My right to have a gun, my right to decide about my health insurance, my right to worship where I please, my right to talk on my cell phone while I'm driving, and my right to drive what I damn well please no matter what the gas mileage seems to be part of the air we breathe. I too breathe this air. I like "my rights."

But there is another question: Just what is "community?" Is there something "real" like community? Is community as real as the individual or is community simply what you get when you add up all of our individual "rights?"

I'm beginning to think that the "common good" is something like an old IBM electric typewriter trying to get its message out in a world full of I-Pods and Blackberries. We see the words but we do no pay much attention. It is an old message from a by-gone era.

But with the typewriter sound in the background we experience the highest murder rate by handguns of any developed nation in the world, we keep up our addiction to oil that is in the hands of those who make us have a foreign policy that keeps us fighting all the time, we continue to warm up our air and oceans and claim its our right to do so, and we talk, talk, talk, while we drive, drive, drive...and don't tell us we can't.

Is the common good a museum piece? Why are we so afraid of loosing our individual rights? Is there any room anymore for giving up at least a small amount of something for me so that "you" might have something? Are we standing in fear-filled lines for swine flu vaccine in part because we are "infected" with a far more serious virus known as the "expressive individualism" disease? What would be a vaccine for such a pandemic?

There are some very old words that were given even before the IBM dinosaur. They are words from the ages which speak of community being more important than any one individual in the community. The words do not come from Karl Marx. They come from crusty old prophets who proclaimed that God cared for those who were struggling in the community and the individuals in that community better start caring for them or there would be judgement.

In this community there was a responsibility to care for the orphan, the widow, and especially the stranger. Later on a faith descendant of those prophets showed up on the scene and declared that the way to "salvation" and balance in life and society was to "clothe the naked, feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, and give grace to the stranger."

After the society of the day got rid of this trouble maker who was messing up individual rights those who decided to follow his way... anyway... formed a "community" where it is written in that old document called the Bible that "when anyone was in need the members of the community brought what they had and laid it at the feet of the apostles so that no one would be 'without.'"

Those who wish to follow this "old way" have a source for understanding the common good...but there are too many people like me who are too busy talking and driving to pay much attention to that "old stuff." I have a sneaking suspicion that the common good would be well served if some individuals paid attention to some of that old stuff.

Bless you,
jody