In one of its most memorable phrases, George Orwell’s 1984 sounds out a ringing indictment of how to transform a society.  “If there is hope,” he tells us, “it lies with the proles.”  As Winston discovers, what hope may lie there is more illusory than real.  The proles are too misdirected and disconnected to rise, united, against Big Brother.  Cheap beer and ficticious war are all that it takes to keep the most populus class from doing anything particularly remakrable.

This week I spent some time talking to some friends who, like me, are basically American proles.  Like our storybook counterparts, we have little if any impact on the political structure of our nation.  Sweet drinks and the manufactured wars broadcast on television are enough to keep us distracted.  However, from these conversations and by remarkable coincidence, I got onto a subject which Orwell’s masses and even Winston himself likely could not understand: The power of community.

As history has shown us time and again, people are at their strongest when they are interconnected in a meaningful way.  The number of connections need not be numerous, and the people involved need not be politically powerful, to have a major impact on a person’s life.  Ask any teacher and they will tell you that the children who excel are almost invariably the children with a parent who gets involved in the education process.  Ask any psychologist and I’m sure you will find that many of their patients leave feeling better simply from having had someone to talk to.

Americans have always had an interesting relationship with community.  We are highly individualist, a reflection of the principles of independence which mark the founding of our nation.  At the same time, we also recognize that no person can be truly independent; school shootings tend to be done by “lone wolves”, violent criminals in general are often social outcasts, and there is a growing consensus that inner-city poverty can be traced in part to the weak family ties which characterize much of urban life.  We are suspicious of government, with its power to create and destroy communities on a whim, tempered, we like to pretend, by the government’s commitment to justice and our own ability to check government misbehavior through the ballot box.  But we are also suspicious of individuals; the manipulative, self-serving creatures who seldom care about anyone but themselves, even when helping others.  The contradictions animate much of American politics.

And so, what were the ideas that prompted this chain of thought?  A faith based community centered on supporting families, and a school centered on creating a communal family for kids who have none of their own.  Both, I think, would be shining examples of how to improve a society.  Hope never requires all of the proles.  A revolution can begin with two.