Community and Betrayal

I’ve always been interested in how communities work. Like, in the sociological sense: people coming together, more or less spontaneously, to do stuff and support causes and just generally be together. You know, basic human interaction stuff.

I think part of my interest stems from the experience of being very much on the outside during high school. Some kids were popular, some weren’t, and I was very emphatically on the “not popular” side of that line. Like many smart but awkward teenager males, I therefore tried to cultivate an air of dispassion and sneering superiority at the horrible microcosm of society which is the standard high school environment… in short, I was a snotty teenage douchebag. (No wonder I didn’t get invited to parties.) Thankfully, I mostly grew out of it.

But one of the residual effects has always been this interest in how and why people interact the way they do. I find it fascinating, even when I’m one of the people doing the interacting. Or perhaps especially. In any case, the way people self-organize into communities, their contributions to and the demands they make on them, are just plain fascinating — especially when those communities face challenges, doubly so when those challenges come from within, and triply (is that a word?) so when they come from the nominal authorities within the community.

Like everyone, I’ve been involved with a number of communities over the years. And one of the things I’ve experienced again and again is the way communities are forced to react when their own authority turns on the membership.

When I was a youth, my family were heavily involved in our local parish; and although I left the Catholic church in my late teens, my mom stayed involved in the parish as choir director… until the diocese decided to shut down and amalgamate three local parishes as a “cost-saving” measure. This despite the large, vibrant and above all solvent nature of our parish. Months of advocacy, argument, and outright protest was all for nought; once the diocese made its decision it was set in stone with no recourse or appeal. Suddenly the parish I grew up in, the community that my mother had spent almost twenty years contributing to… was gone. She was devastated, and that pretty much ended her participation in the Catholic church; certainly she didn’t bother to drive the thirty minutes required to attend the new “amalgamated” parish. She doesn’t talk much about it, but I know she feels betrayed and abandoned by the leadership at the diocese level who were ostensibly supposed to be fostering and supporting her community.

When I was a student at Trent University during the Mike Harris years, the university administration bought into the whole “austerity” rhetoric of his so-called “Common Sense Revolution” and decided that the only way to meet the challenges coming from the provinces’ funding cuts and the “double-cohort” of incoming high school graduates following the elimination of Grade 13… would be to gut the University’s independent college system and close down two of Trent’s five residential colleges. (Don’t ask me how that works: twenty years later and I still can’t figure out the logic.) Trent students, faculty and alumni resisted, trying to preserve the unique academic culture and campus traditions of the University. It was my own introduction into activism and activist circles, and the struggle was not without cost… but we did win victories in that fight, even if one college was shuttered and another converted from its original purpose to a graduate facility.

Starting in my mid-thirties, I spent almost fifteen years of my life participating in the Society for Creative Anachronism, medieval re-enactment society and generally nerdy subculture. Without revamping it too much here (I spent years writing about it on my old blog) the SCA occupies a weird sort of middle ground between serious historical reenactment, experimental archaeology, an extreme combat sport, immersive Live-Action-Roleplay and a counter-cultural community/obsession on par with, say, the Burning Man festival. Hundreds of thousands of people have belonged to the SCA over it’s fifty-plus-year history.

I loved it. Loved it. I loved being part of that community, participating in events, wearing medieval clothing and displaying my registered heraldry, fighting in medieval-ish armour and learning how to fight with medieval-ish weapons. I enjoyed the goofy names and the made-up kingdoms and the titles and awards and traditions. I met many people and made many friends all around the world, and not incidentally met my spouse in the Society… and we’ve still got a house full of SCA-related gack that we keep tripping over.

Unfortunately, the SCA has a problem with safety and inclusivity. It’s not alone among hobby organizations (or even in the minority) in facing these challenges, but the SCA also has a serious flaw in that there are few if any structures in place, either at the local, regional or global level, to address and reconcile problem behaviours among its participants. And by “problem behaviours” I mean sexual assault, homophobic harassment, and white supremacist infiltration. Several incidents in recent years have brought these issues to light and there’s a very vocal faction within the Society trying to reform things in order to protect the most vulnerable members… but there is resistance to change in the organization both from other members and the Society’s “BoD”, the Board of Directors. It might seem silly that people are investing so much into what’s essentially a fantasy escape hobby, but it’s true… so much so that when I waded into the controversy on my old blog last year, I received literal death threats. And when I tried to bring those threats and other harassment to the attention of the SCA and the BoD, I was ignored. Eventually, and like many others, I found the toxic push-back against the efforts at reform too much and was forced to quit the Society for my own health and well-being.

And then, of course, there’s my new hobby/obsession with two football teams, the Portland Timbers and their sister-club the Portland Thorns. I was never really into team sports when I was younger but earlier this summer I discovered these two football teams (soccer, in American parlance) out in Portland, Oregon, and their amazing, diverse and inclusive fan-base. Portland has been at ground zero for a number of neo-fascist attacks over the past year, and the teams’ supporters clubs have been at the forefront of anti-fascist organizing… and now they’re suffering a push-back from the MLS, which is trying to ban “political” signage, specifically directed against the Iron Front “three arrows” logo. The fanbase is pushing back, and a major feud is developing.

What the above tweet demonstrates is something I’ve seen over and over in various community groups, and it’s the point I’m belatedly getting at — there’s the community, and then there’s the people who run it. In good times, there’s little or no divide; whether it’s the front office of a football team or the administration of a university or the bishop of a diocese or even a volunteer board of directors.

In bad times… that’s when community discovers that the people who hold the power (or the money, usually) have nothing in almost nothing common with the bulk of the community they’re profiting from. The bishop doesn’t care about the decades of love, support and community-building in an obscure parish in rural Ontario because he’s got to save money, close facilities, and justify his budget to the Vatican’s bureaucracy. The university administrator who was hired to “modernize” and “streamline” the institution in the face of neoliberal austerity measures doesn’t care about decades of tradition, bonding and the unique character of a small university… to the point where they’re perfectly comfortable calling in and encouraging the brutal police repression of their own students in order to silence dissent. The volunteer Board of Directors lacks the fortitude to take a stand and defend their own membership, fearing lawsuits and declining attendance numbers. The multi-millionaire team owners decide that anti-fascist displays might hurt TV ad revenue, and so forth.

The response, from the community, the ground-level, grassroots community which has done the work for years… is to feel betrayed. And rightly so.

I’ve seen it over and over. When you belong to something greater, when you lend your strength and creativity and love to it, you build something. You become a part of it. A reenactment hobby, a quirky arts university community, a football club or a local parish… it’s important to the people involved. I know there are those who dismiss such things as irrelevant or petty or foolish compared to the big issues in the world, but my opinion is now and has always been that the communities we build are the reason to address the big issues.

The communities we build are why we as humans are alive, and they’re worthy and important things to defend, no matter how small: I know a woman who’s campaigned tirelessly for more than a year to save her book club from budget cuts. There’s a local scout troop in my area that staged a revolt and actually went rogue from Scouts Canada a few years ago because their families could no longer afford rising membership fees. These are things that people do because they have a passion and see something worth participating in… and preserving in the face of adversity.

I honestly doubt that the people in charge — even if they came up the ranks themselves — can fully understand the feeling of betrayal that comes when they make decisions detrimental to the community at the grassroots level. They see a “big picture” that the locals down the ladder might not see… but they forget that those local “little pictures” are all a part of it. The reality is that the people who’ve done the work — which is almost always volunteer work at their own expense — have a right to feel ownership of the community they’ve helped build. In fact, I’d argue that they have as much or more ownership than some suit in a boardroom or a signatory on a bank account.

And just like the Timbers fan states in the tweet I posted above, there’s a cost when those efforts are betrayed.

The Timbers fan-base is a specific example but it’s something that applies to each and every situation I’ve shared in this post. The Timbers Army is quite literally the reason the team exists, and they’ve been incredibly supportive for decades. Punishing that fan-base for taking a stand against fascism and racism of all things, is just plain stupid and the fans are becoming increasingly resentful of it. (There’s already a boycott of concession services at Providence Park stadium, and some fans are calling for walkouts and boycotts of matches, too; this stubborn insistence on banning a specific logo is likely to be very expensive and damaging for the Timbers franchise.)

Ultimately, it’s a question of who makes up a community. Perhaps this is the anarchist in me speaking, but I’m firmly of the opinion that communities are made up of the people who belong to it, from the bottom up. Owners, administrators, directors — they aren’t the community. They may have their roots in there (or not, as the case may be) but when they accept a position of governance they set themselves apart from it. In the best case, these leaders take up stewardship as a sacrifice in order to see the community taken care of (this is how I wish politicians would look at holding office, by the way); in the worst case it’s a callous appraisal of how much personal gain they can glean from being in charge. And it’s the callous gain leading to placing profit over people that leads to the community being betrayed, always.

Sometimes the community can survive that betrayal. Sometimes it can’t. My mother’s parish is a footnote in history, a few Facebook friendships, and some fond memories. The Society for Creative Anachronism continues, as does the debate within it on safety and inclusivity. Trent University changed and continues to change, but the efforts we made to preserve it have become part of the story of that community. The Portland Timbers and their fan-base… well, that’s early days yet. I can hope, as a member of the Timbers Army, that the owners and league will realize that this isn’t a hill worth fighting over (much less dying on) and we can go back to waving banners and watching soccer and focusing on fundraising for community initiatives.