The video started as a man asleep in his car in a Wendy’s drive-thru line. It ended with the police killing him. Like many people, I’m saddened and angry that yet another unarmed black man is dead. But what truly broke my heart was that the police were called in the first place.
As Rayshard's car sat unmoving in the middle of a busy drive-thru line, none of the other drivers got out to help him. Not one car stopped. Drivers simply veered around his car and the fast food line continued uninterrupted. People who could have checked on him, could have woken him, could have gotten him to move his car to a parking spot where he could sleep it off, didn't.
As I watched the videos and read the stories, the first question that pulled at my heart was: Have we really stopped caring for each other? But, as I thought about what I’ve learned over the last three years of research into community thriving, I knew the more appropriate question to be: Who is responsible for solving society’s ills?
We stopped feeling obligated to one another, stopped taking care of each other, and stopped trusting each other.
Over the past decades, we’ve become less and less invested in our communities and each other. We’ve become less engaged in everything from politics and religious groups to volunteering and civic leadership. We stopped feeling obligated to one another, stopped taking care of each other, and stopped trusting each other.
Instead, we look to government agencies, nonprofits and other institutions to take care of things.
There are 328 million people in the US, yet we make over 240 million calls to 911 each year. More often than not, we call because we don’t want to involve ourselves in the problem, we don’t know how else to handle it, or because we’re uncomfortable with our fellow citizens. That is how we end up in a place where, when a car isn’t moving in a drive-thru line, we simply drive around it and call the police to take care of it.
It’s not just community safety. From educating our kids, being responsible for our health, and taking care of those who have fallen on hard times to picking up trash and cleaning up the roads, we’ve delegated most of the tasks of caring for our communities (and each other) to institutions. In many cases, we are asking them to solve a huge spectrum of problems that they’re not appropriately equipped, staffed, funded, or trained to do.
And, as Tim O’Reilly so aptly wrote when he cited Donald Kettl’s “vending machine” analogy, “we pay our taxes, we expect services. And when we don’t get what we expect, our ‘participation’ is limited to protest—essentially, shaking the vending machine.”
When it seems like the system is failing us, we organize rallies. We cry for change on social media. We demand firings. We work ourselves into a lather over who is leading the institutions. It never seems to occur to us to ask whether the institutions should be the ones with such responsibility in the first place.
We’ve been living amidst institutional systems for generations now, so the idea that we (each of us) are responsible for each other is a completely foreign notion. But it’s the notion we most need to return to. We can, and must, reclaim our sense of agency for our communities, our neighbors and the problems we face.
Governments, nonprofits, and institutions are merely organizing mechanisms we’ve chosen to manage problems that are too important to ignore but too large for us individually. We, the people, get to choose which problems to delegate to them. We get to choose when they no longer serve us. We can choose when entirely new ones are needed. And we can choose when we, and not an institution, are the right people to take action.
A neighbor who cares, a few volunteers, or a group of passionate problem solvers are far more capable of solving many more problems than we imagine. When we see a problem, we can stop and ask ourselves—before picking up the phone—could I be the one who cares? Could I be the one to solve this problem?