Healthy relationships: Understanding the importance of connections in the community and beyond

I have been thinking about connections a great deal lately. The beginning of a new year, the impact of COVID, or maybe just the fact that I’m getting older has helped me see connections where I had not really seen them before.

One example of this for me is the issue of climate change. While I have always been supportive of efforts to address climate change — I reuse and recycle and work to minimize my own carbon footprint — it wasn’t until earlier this year that I realized the very real impact the changing climate was having on my life and those I care about.

My father lives in an assisted living facility in Colorado, and in October, after being there less than a month, he was evacuated due to the encroaching wildfires.

Imagine the challenge of evacuating elderly people, many with significant cognitive impairment, during a pandemic, to somewhere safe from wildfires — wildfires made worse and more deadly by years of increasing temperatures and drought. While my father returned safely to his facility after about ten days, suddenly the changing climate felt very real and close to my heart and home.

A second connection occurred around the issue of broadband internet access. While I had always known the lack of broadband access was a justice issue, especially for rural folks, it had not ever really felt like it was my justice issue — until a pandemic swept through the land keeping people shut up into their own homes. Suddenly, I realized that for victims of domestic or sexual violence, not being able to access the services of Centre Safe through the internet made them significantly less safe and so much more isolated. Suddenly, broadband access became part of the fight for justice and safety for victims.

The events of the past weeks and months have reinforced for me the importance of connections — the ones we know and count on and the finding of new ones — to our survival. When asked why he had come from Atlanta to protest in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. responded in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, many pundits and politicians said, “This is not who we are.” I beg to differ.

It may not be who we claim to be, who we want to be, or who we aspire to be, but it is most certainly exactly who we are. The attack on the Capitol may have been carried out at the instigation of those whose only way to cling to power is to divide and incite violence, but it has its roots in our country’s unwillingness to acknowledge and address the issues that continue to fundamentally divide us — racism, poverty and the casual acceptance of interpersonal violence.

We have refused to see the connections between us, to acknowledge and live into the reality that “whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Until we all see those connections, the thread that “ties us in a single garment of destiny” will continue to unravel. Healing requires the recognition of what is broken. To begin to understand the connections between us, we must be honest about the places of disconnect and separation. I believe that the connections will save us, but not until we recognize the distance between the ends of the threads.