Building Community

He was magnificent: what you can do when you have to

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Because just as my friend’s husband found, when something is needed – and by needed I mean either practically necessary because there is no alternative (ie, the baby is coming or the power is out) or when something is needed because a body of people are committed to its rightness and seriousness (ie, the embargo requires us to make our own cloth, or the bus boycott requires elderly women to walk miles each day) we find in ourselves capacities that we hardly knew were there. While sometimes the worst does happen, often we are surprised by outcomes – simply because we underestimate people.

Reasons for good cheer

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In the vast and traumatic mess that we are facing, I’m seeing some surprising signs of hope – not that we’ll magically reshape our society into the renewable paradise a lot of us would like to see, but that people are well, not acting like complete idiots – that they are responding to things fairly appropriately, even wisely sometimes.

Did the Amish get it right after all?

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At the time when the national banking fraternity was on its knees in Washington, begging for money, news all over the media reported that Hometown Heritage bank in Lancaster County, Pa., was having its best year ever. Hometown Heritage may be the only bank in the world, surely one of the few, that has drive-by window service designed to accommodate horses and buggies. Some 95% of the bank’s customers are Amish farmers. The banker, Bill O’Brien, says that he has not lost a penny on them in 20 years.