Institution-less in Gaza

And maybe eyeless as well. I got an email the other day from a sometime Point Roberts visitor and relative of locals who is putting up a new web site in hopes that it will help to address Point Roberts’ residents’difficulties in creating some kind of community voice both for dealing with the community and for all kinds of other purposes, as well. So, I’ve been thinking today, having witnessed some of that broken-ness yesterday at the 4th of July parade, about why Point Roberts is so fractured. Things work for awhile, and then--all too frequently--they suddenly fly apart. Maybe it's not 'too frequently' but inevitably.

There are all the obvious reasons for the fracturedness and fractiousness of the Point community: lots of full time residents who don’t actually live here full-time; more Canadians than Americans who own property, but more Americans than Canadians who can vote; the border (which could itself be reasons numbers one through ten); a substantial portion of community members who are retired and thus less concerned pragmatically about the issues that affect younger people (jobs/economy) and younger people with children (schools, recreation). When the old people want some recreation, they take a cruise.

Other reasons are possible, but I don’t have any data to confirm them. However (never to be stopped by the absence of data), I strongly suspect that there are a lot of people who came here just because it was a kind of outpost where they weren’t going to be put upon by other people and weren’t going to be badgered into being members of a community. Voting patterns here suggest a hardy band of libertarians and they are bound to come in conflict with that other resident group of former hippies who are happy to have everybody in the soup together.

There are plenty of reasons why community doesn’t really work here. But I think the biggest one may be that we are a community without community institutions. We have a community health clinic, and a community library, and a community center and a community church. None of those institutions is set up to in any way create a sense of community beyond their narrow focus. Kris and staff run a great little library; Virginia and staff run a much needed health clinic; the community center itself is just a building, really, for events that somebody else has to figure out. The church is as ecumenical as a Lutheran church can possibly be, but it has worked hard to broaden its reach without substantial success, although the new minister is working hard to bring more people into the church for non-religion-specific events. But there’s nothing else: the newspaper, once a month, just isn’t enough, or often enough, to provide that center point.

In a brief conversation with my son (a web publishing/internet maven) about the possibility of a website as a community institution, he replied cryptically to me, ‘No clicks without bricks. You need a pub.’ I’m looking forward to hearing more from him on the topic, but I have so far figured out that he’s saying a website won’t work if it doesn’t also have some kind of physical community presence. I’ve looked at a few previous local website attempts, and they certainly don’t seem to have generated that conversational focus on their web basis alone.

So, we need a pub; I don’t think he meant a bar, though, because there are plenty of those already. It hasn't helped.