Spreading the good news.... for some

When ideal meets reality, conflict inevitably arises. It is not difficult to dream up an ideal community. But it becomes a nearly impossible task when we try to make it work. The first challenge that I had was deciding how open my community should be. I don’t want my community to be some sort of an exclusive club. But In order for my ideal community to work, I need people who would want to live by the ideal of my community. And in order to keep our community ideal, I would need to screen out people who do not fit. My community cannot grow indefinitely. So, rather than advertising about the physical place, I want to spread the way of life that my community embraces. People can adopt the philosophies and ideals of my community and start their own, and my community will serve as a model to which other communities can learn and immediate.

Adopting the philosophies of my community requires a change in heart. As I write it, I don’t know if I could fit into this community. The ideal of helping others and sharing may be intellectually sound but really desiring to live in the community is a different matter. Also, voluntary participation is hard to achieve. I don’t want to have any laws in my community. I want people to do what is right for themselves and their neighbors. All these require people becoming selfless, which would literally be going against human nature and is impossible. To convince people to live in my community or live like our community, I first need to persuade people to be less selfish and that spending their lives trying to accumulate wealth is futile. I also need people to be thankful in small things and find happiness in life itself.

For people who are fully satisfied with the way they live, my “advertisement” would not mean much. But for people who have experienced dissatisfaction and emptiness in the way we live, my message will be a good news. Whether my place will be better than typical American community is depended on one’s standard. For people who enjoy buying lavish things and have no interest in a communal way of living, my community will probably the worst place to live. But for people who know how to be appreciative of small things and enjoy interaction with neighbors, my community will be the ideal for them as well.

As I was writing my plan, I realized that I’m sort of copying what God did. Christianity is all about community, and God wanted humans to live in a certain way. Israel, although with many flaws, was chosen to be the ideal that other nations could see and follow. It wasn’t so much their geographical location that made this community special. It was the relationship this community had with God, and through that relationship, the relationship between people became special. Moses was a visionary who preached the way a community of God should live. But for some Israelites, the concept was hard to grasp and some preferred the way they lived as slaves. In a way, we are becoming a slave to large companies and the system we created. Through constant advertisements, we are being trained to spend more money and be dissatisfied. We are in this continual cycle where we work hard to buy something and work even harder to buy something else. This doesn’t necessary have to be the way we live. We can change it and we should change it.