I post this quote from Peter Block's book "Community" every year. It doesn't get much attention because it's not built for social media: it's thick.

But there really isn't a better explanation of the "why" behind the work I do, and its encouragement for communities to move away from blame, apathy, and entitlement and towards possibility, intentionality, and compassion becomes more important every day.

"Given the dominant context that values scarcity, leadership, individualism, fear, and fault, anything positive or hopeful becomes an anomaly. An exception, an accident. In the retributive culture, cynicism is the norm and becomes the lead story. Cynicism justifies retribution. Retribution is fueled by cynicism.

In this context, possiblity and vision become buried in the middle section of the news, or become an upbeat pat on the back as the anchor goes off the air. So it is not by accident that when citizens do find a way to use their gifts, or commit to something thought impossible, or bring faith and gratitude into the world, the story is reduced to a 'human interest' piece—the kiss of death when it comes to changing the context in our communities. It is a feel-good diversion. Something to calm our nerves. Possiblity and the faith that supports it may be strong declarations for the individual, but for the collective, they are neutered and treated as merely charming.

Possibility also gets undermined by being confused with optimism. Even when leaders speak to the possibility of our community, in the stuck community we consider it a motivational speech, a sales pitch, a bootstrap keynote to make people feel better and lift our spirits from what we call reality.

But possibility is not a prediction, or a goal; it is a choice to bring a certain quality into our lives. Optimism, which is a prediction about the future, has no power. Pessimism is equally irrelevant.

The ways in which possibility is marginalized underline the importance of context. All that does not confirm the prevailing mindset is made marginal and cute. This is why, if you want to create an alternative future, you have to shift the context, for all that disconfirms the current context will be discarded.

To summarize, the context of retribution and the story that grows out of it cause our attempts to build community to be what actually keeps it unchanged.

Retribution by its nature serves to fragment community and reduce social capital. The side effect is that each citizen’s accountability for the well-being of community is reduced.

The retributive context, given form through the dominant public conversation, is based on a culture of fear, fault finding, fragmentation, and worrying more about taxes than compassion; it is more about being right than working something out, more about gerrymandering for our own interests than giving voice to those on the margin.

The point is this: Citizens have the capacity to change the community story, to reclaim the power to name what is worth talking about, to bring a new context into being. If we do not choose to change this context and strategies that follow from it, we will produce no new outcomes for our institutions, neighborhoods, and towns.”

—Peter Block, Community

(Phil Eich)