Community Action

I admit to being jittery yesterday, working alone in my office, trying to deal with all of the unexpected: someone tried to charge $8,000 through our website, and tried over 200 times. The filters worked, but I unexpectedly spent time increasing the available protections through the guidance of a young, patient support person over the telephone. Thank you, Traver, for your kindness and patience.

All day long the day got more complicated. One vendor said a bill was past due; that required finding an image of the canceled check and sending it out. A conference call had to be arranged for 9:00 pm. Everyone I spoke with was feeling overwhelmed. Somehow I managed to admit that I was and with that out in the air, others confessed their unease.

On my way to a late afternoon meeting the traffic was horrendous, meaning that I had to get off the highway and wind my way through the back roads to get there during rush hour. I didn't have the confidence I ordinarily have while driving, so the added complexity of driving on streets with stop lights and cross streets made me wary.

And I was late. I hate being late. My arrival did constitute a quorum at least, so I was welcomed.

And then the meeting began, a group of concerned citizens who care about our communities, diverse, every shade of skin, every accent, every primary identity. We wanted to do something to relieve the community of its angst in a way that created community.

As the conversation continued, as each of us participated, and everyone did in a lively discussion, all of the jitteriness disappeared. All of it dissipated.

Because we had gotten outside of ourselves and become a creative, living, consensus.

We are going to explore having public hearings where people from around the county can come and tell their stories about housing: buying an inflated valued home that required too much income to maintain, predatory lending and how it feels to be conned into financing, losing a job and therefore losing a home, and perhaps the most pervasive, fear of losing a home. What we realized was that because of the complicity involved in many of these predatory mortgage deals, homeowners knowing that their income was been inflated on the application forms, people feel shamed into silence. We want to get through that silence and listen.

We want to let everyone know they are not alone. We are not alone. And our insecurity and fear are isolating. We have to work through it and find the commonality.