What is Village Thinking?

(the text of a speech I made at a CrimeWatch rally in my neighborhood in May of 2008)

Be a Village

My name is Laura Adams, and I live on College Street, 3 doors down from where Sojourner Truth once made her home. Some of her descendants still live in my neighborhood, right next door to me.

We are the Truth Home Neighbors, and we are currently organizing a neighborhood association.

I have learned many valuable lessons from my neighbors, once I came out of my cocoon of fear, and met them. I’m going to share the most important one I learned. My neighbors taught me the meaning of “It takes a village to raise a child.”

Like most yuppies, I thought that was nothing more than government-speak meaning “we are going to spend a lot of your money”.

What it really means is that we need to BE a village to raise a child.

What is a village? A village is a community bound together by ties of kinship. In a village, everyone is related to you by blood, marriage or adoption. They are your family.

A village, then, is an extended family. And that is what we must be in order to raise our children. To be a village, we must reject thinking in terms of “us” and “them” when it comes to our neighborhood, our community and our world.

That type of thinking is responsible for most of our human tragedies, including man’s inhumanity to man. We must stop pointing fingers at others, and point them at ourselves. If we are not actively part of the solution, we are part of the problem.

To be a village requires that we help our worst neighbors to be better neighbors, not hate them because they are not like us or out of fear. To be a village requires that we look out for one another, and not just the people who are like us.

To be a village, we must learn to cooperate, to work together, and to care about one another. For our neighborhoods are our villages, our neighbors our kin.

To be a village, requires that we learn “village thinking”.

Learning village thinking isn’t easy. It isn’t something you can learn from a book or a seminar. It’s a change that has to take place in your heart. You have to learn the lesson that first appears in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, and it’s a lesson that Jesus tried to teach so it is found in the Gospels, as well. “Love thy neighbor as thyself”. As if they were your own kin, your own flesh and blood. All of them. Period. This type of love is called “compassion”.

Martin Luther King tried to teach that lesson, when he told the world about his dream, “to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood”. Sojourner Truth also expressed that lesson when she asked, “Ain’t I a woman?” It’s a popular speech topic for people who want the world to be a better place.

My neighbors taught me what those words mean, and how to live them. And by doing so, they became my family, and I theirs.

I ask all of you to find it in your hearts to love your neighbors as your own kin. Even the ones that you wish would move away, preferably to another country. If I can, so can you.

If I can learn to love my neighbors, who are members of the Guy family and members of the MOB gang, so can you. You will learn many valuable lessons about yourself and others, when you do.

I ask all of you to engage in “village thinking” and be part of the solution.

I ask all of you to help keep each other safe so that we can all walk the streets of our villages, without fear of violence.

I ask all of you to help raise our children by being a village.

We are the Truth Home Neighbors and we are: One neighborhood. One family. One village.

Laura Adams