First, a word of disclaimer. My view of bureaucracy is well summarized in some of Moore’s laws of bureaucracy:

• Bureaucracies have no heart (As an example, think Spirit Airlines refusal to refund the price of a ticket to a dying veteran.).
• Bureaucracies are perverse (Here in South Carolina, over 200 people have been kicked off the ballot because the bureaucracy responsible for candidates’ filing gave incorrect directions on how to do it.).
• Bureaucracies will thrash about, causing much cost, pain and destruction (see the above!).

If I (and so many others) feel this way, why do we still have bureaucracies? Two reasons:

Bureaucracies tend to be self-perpetuating. As formulated in Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely. In other words, in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

More importantly, though, bureaucracies exist to carry out routine functions efficiently and in a consistent manner – bureaucracies are the wheels that keep organizations (governments, businesses…) running more or less smoothly. But this also implies a more fundamental role for bureaucracies. Their rules, regulations, and procedures encapsulate the organization’s corporate memory of what works, at least within a bureaucracy’s domain. The more rigid this procedural structure, the more resistant the bureaucracy is to change. In addition, larger organizations tend to be more bureaucratic because they tend to do more things on a routine basis. This implies that they house silos of specialists skilled in some routine function.

But resilience is all about managing and adapting to change. Achieving resilience thus means tearing down the walls between balkanized bureaucracies that are busily making their silos into fortresses. This leads to a paradox: if a community is working to become more resilient, it will try to take action through its tried and proven bureaucratic channels, the ones least prone to change. Further, since adapting to major disruptions (e.g., hurricanes, recessions) generally does not neatly fit into a single bureaucracy’s purview, it forces bureaucracies to interact with one another in non-routine ways. If the community’s bureaucracy is flexible, the community is likely to be more resilient; if not, any efforts to enhance the community’s resilience become much more difficult.

Of course, these are general thoughts. However, they lead to some specific things to consider in determining whether a community’s bureaucracies will help or hinder efforts to become more resilient.

• History. If a bureaucracy is a sort of corporate memory container, then look at the challenges the community, esp. the bureaucracy, has faced. Were they varied? Were some of them relatively recent? Were they successfully met? “No” answers may indicate that the bureaucracy is too rigid.
• The age of the bureaucracy. Just like people, a bureaucracy can get “hardening of the arteries” with age. They can accrete documentation requirements, for example, that continue on long after the need has disappeared. In a crisis, these will sow frustration in both the public and the bureaucracy and slow down recovery.
• Collaboration. Has the bureaucracy worked with others outside their domain to solve crosscutting problems? City governments such as San Diego and Baltimore that are managed in a fashion that forces bureaucracies to work together toward common crosscutting goals are likely to be more resilient than ones that are managed in a more traditional manner.
• Leadership. Is the leadership of the bureaucracy open to new ideas? Does the leadership have experience working outside the bureaucracy? Has any of the leadership come from outside the bureaucracy? Again, “No” answers raise red flags.
• Innovation. Has the bureaucracy periodically changed how it does business? Is continuous improvement a part of its culture?
• Number. More bureaucracies imply more organizations that must be aligned to actually make something happen.

Thus, bureaucracy can be a boon or a bane to community resilience. In a following blog, I’ll try to provide a few case studies highlighting both.

At all levels, citizens want consistently affordable and reliable electricity. That implies a resilient community should strike a balance between redundancy, reliability and efficiency. For a community, efficiency means the lowest cost per kilowatt to consumers; reliability means no brownouts and minimal losses of service; and redundancy means that there are alternative sources of power that are unlikely to be affected by disruptions to any one source.

Virtually all communities in the US get their electricity from large centralized facilities (“baseload power”). Whether we like it or not, almost all renewable energy sources are more expensive and less reliable than our current baseload power sources – coal, natural gas and nuclear. For example, all of our nuclear plants are operating at > 90% of their peak capacity; in general, wind and solar operate at < 30% – after all, they produce no power if the sun doesn’t shine, or the wind isn’t blowing. Based on EIA data, the cost per kilowatt hour from our current baseload power sources is significantly less than from any of the alternatives (coal- and nuclear-generated electricity are 10-25% the cost of solar electricity; and ~60% the cost of wind). While we may see future increases in efficiency from renewables, it is unlikely that costs will come down enough to significantly displace “conventional” sources. Thus, it is also unlikely that we will see changes in how we generate the baseload power communities need.

However, through our public, corporate and individual investments we can enhance the resilience of our communities’ electric sectors. The key is to focus on redundancy. In general, the major vulnerability of a community’s electric system is the grid, not the power source. Thus, redundancy in this context means ensuring access to electricity (or a substitute) generated off the grid.

This shifts the paradigm significantly. Coal and nuclear do not scale down. While many of us use natural gas for heating and cooling and hot water, few of us have the generators necessary to generate significant amounts of electricity from natural gas off the grid.

Conversely, alternative energy sources – wind, and especially solar and geothermal – scale down quite well. At the scale of a neighborhood or a household, they become the logical choices if the grid is not available. However, investment is needed to make them truly good choices, and changes in their business models should be considered.

We don’t need to invest in making them more efficient – as a nation we have spent enough on that. Since the 1970’s, we have poured billions of dollars into solar energy. The cost of solar vs our current baseload power systems is still a factor of 4-10 higher. While we may see some further improvements in efficiency, it doesn’t seem worthwhile to invest much more in efficiency (and don’t get me started on Solyndra and our other investments in crony capitalism!). Where investment is needed is in improved reliability and robustness.

Currently, solar panels are usually not tied down securely to a homeowner’s roof. If they were, it is likely the roof would fly off in a windstorm. That means that the solar panels themselves can become “unguided missiles” in high winds, increasing the damage to neighboring structures. If we are to increase our resilience using solar power, we need to invest in better installation technologies and think through how to better protect them during windstorms. Home-sized wind systems face similar challenges and require the same sort of investment.

Achieving a more resilient electric sector also means we need to consider a very different business model for renewables (I include geothermal heat pumps in this group – which already are cost competitive): encouraging local utilities to install and maintain them (A local co-op in Colorado is doing this for geothermal heat pumps.). This could allow the capital cost to be amortized over a longer period without a burden on the homeowner (in fact, potentially a net savings), while ensuring that systems were properly installed and maintained.

Thus, a resilient energy profile for a community should include both conventional baseload technologies delivered by the grid and renewables; the balance between these will vary depending on the circumstances of the community (e.g., NYC potentially could use wave power). The challenge for each community is to strike its own balance in a wise manner; one that recognizes the real problems and opportunities, and leads us to invest our scarce resources most effectively.

“… we must reach out both to the towns torn by tornadoes and those whose lifeblood is slowly dripping away. We must help them find new purposes, new reasons for being. We must be midwives to their rebirth…”

A little flowery, but certainly heartfelt. However, I didn’t offer any suggestions for how to impregnate rural communities with a new purpose. In order to do so I’m going to channel my inner Brian Dabson (RUPRI); James Clifton (Gallup); and Bruce Katz (Brookings). With their help, here is my prescription for the repurposing of a rural community.

Know thyself. Often, rural communities are painfully aware of the problems they face, but haven’t taken the time to do a dispassionate assessment of themselves as a community. They see the decline, or the danger of decline, but haven’t really looked at their strengths and weaknesses, or any opportunities that may be out there for them. But who knows their communities better than they do? Who else knows who are the suppliers and the customers for local businesses? Who else knows whether there are opportunities to replace “imported” (from outside the community) goods and services with something available inside? Who else knows what makes the community special? Who else knows what about the community needs changing?

Further, most rural communities probably haven’t looked at themselves in their regional setting. Does the community play a role in its regional economy? Is there a regional strategy it can be a part of? Are there resources in the region the community can take advantage of – not only financial or material, but human, for example, to help in planning? Too often, as Dabson says, “Regional collaboration is often regarded as an unnatural act.”

A recent experiment in New York State (and yes, Virginia, most of New York State is quite rural!) points out how effective regional collaboration can be. Initially, the state divided itself into nine regions reflecting existing interdependencies. Governor Cuomo championed an innovative regional approach to economic development based on partnerships across each region – government, business, academia, NGOs. Although there hasn’t been time for great successes to emerge, there is now real hope in small towns across the state, because they are working together, pooling resources, aiming for a more vibrant future.

It’s not innovators but entrepreneurs who hold the keys to the future. A vibrant community is one where people don’t have jobs, they have careers. People often forget that while Apple may have owed its start to the innovations of Steve Wozniak, it owes its present health to the entrepreneurial spirit of Steve Jobs. Is there someone in the community who has a good idea for substituting a local product for something imported? Is there someone in the community who has a good idea for a new product using local resources? Do they know how to market what they have? Do they have the funding? Could they “re-purpose” the community? A key to re-inventing rural communities is to encourage this kind of entrepreneurial thinking.

All solutions are local. If a rural community wants a vibrant future, it can’t look to the federal government or the state for a “guidebook” on how to achieve that. As Clifton says.

“It is wrong thinking to imagine that Washington has solutions.”

The only worthwhile guidance that any of us outside the community can provide is that the community must define its own desired future, one that can be reached from where the community is now. To reach it will require patient and persistent effort on the part of the entire community – not just the leadership, but everyone. And that means that everyone in the community has to buy in to a common vision of the future.

Resources are wherever you find them. Taking action – trying to create a different future for the community – requires “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” In other words, it takes resources and effort to change the community’s future. Some of those resources can come from within. For example, in the very small town of Sangudo, Alberta (population 400), a group of retirees created an investment co-op. They pooled their funds to support promising business opportunities within their own community, and have given Sangudo a new lease on life.

But that doesn’t mean that the community need only rely on its own resources. For example, since 1977, Coastal Enterprises, Inc., has been helping rural communities improve their economies – first in Maine, and then more regionally. It is estimated that there are at least $5 billion in current investments by regional and local Community Development Investment Funds across the country. And let’s not forget that the needed resources may not be financial, but human. The extension services provided by our nation’s land grant colleges and universities offer a wide range of development support to communities willing to use them. While the community might not have a Small Business Development Center, one might be available regionally, or perhaps at the state level.

Communications play an increasingly important role in finding resources. That implies that rural communities should strive to get as much communications bandwidth as possible. Broadband internet access is an obvious part of that, but fostering connections from the community to the world outside is at least as important. Businesses to state or national associations, churches and other faith-based organizations to regional or national groups, ties to professional societies, and, of course, connections between local government and regional and state governmental bodies all can pay dividends to communities otherwise isolated.

Four ingredients making up a simple prescription, but one that can work to revitalize rural communities; one that can work, that is, if a community has the patience, the will, and – yes – the passion for itself to make it work. Whether it’s capitalizing on their space, their soil, or their proximity to an urban center, there are ways for rural communities to re-purpose themselves and to achieve a more vital future. But they have to believe in themselves and the vision they create, and recognize that it will take time to achieve the future they desire.

I won’t try to discuss their findings in detail, but they can be looked at from many different directions. From a community standpoint, perhaps the most useful way is to look at what the authors found to be the “five Centres of Gravity” (obviously, the primary authors aren’t Americans):

• Chronic fiscal imbalances.
• Greenhouse gas emissions.
• Global governance failure. The authors see this as the most central risk, connected to all of the others.
• Unsustainable population growth.
• Critical systems failures.

These are connected by four “Critical Connections:”

• Severe income disparity.
• Major systemic financial failure.
• Unforeseen negative consequences of regulation.
• Extreme volatility in energy and agricultural prices.

If community resilience means managing change, then these risks – defined globally – can be seen as drivers of and impediments to local change that community leaders need to be aware of. If, at its most basic, community resilience resides in connections and resources, then we need to see what these global risks can tell us about changes in community connections and resources.

Perhaps the most important is at the core – governance failure. At the community level, this is most often seen in the breakdown of trust among the members of the community. This loss of trust is perhaps the most pervasive and corrosive force affecting public life today. Viet Nam and Watergate, Clinton’s follies, Bush’s bumbling when Katrina hit, and the current dysfunction in Washington have badly eroded our trust in government. The financial crisis, the greed of some on Wall Street, and the BP oil spill, have eroded our trust in business. Jimmy Swaggart, Tammy Faye, and the Catholic Church’s continuing scandal have eroded our faith in our spiritual leaders. And on and on. Every day, the public hears of a new reason we can’t trust our leaders. Community leaders need to be aware of the public’s almost kneejerk distrust, and continually work on rebuilding it.

In a recent blog, I wrote about income disparities and what they mean in terms of hindering communications within a community. I won’t repeat what I said there, but this, too, is an important risk to the connectivity of a community – manageable, but too often unmanaged.

Systemic financial failures impact communities in many ways. Demand for services goes up while available resources decline. Promises made in terms of retirement and benefits in better times cannot be met. Resources are even more concentrated in a few. We have few good answers to how to cope with these changes, and too many examples (Greece, for example) that show us what will happen if we don’t effectively address them.

We’re already seeing extreme volatility in the cost of energy, and of agricultural products. It’s not so much that the cost is high, but that we don’t know what the cost is going to be tomorrow. Individuals and families, businesses, and governments simply can’t plan and so have to employ very different strategies in terms of budgeting, buying, and saving if they’re going to keep their heads above water. And the impacts on rural communities are huge. If you factor in questions about water availability (energy and water are so closely tied), it’s no wonder that our agricultural communities are under such stress.

The leaders of resilient communities will be aware of these risks, and factor them into their future actions. But within the authors’ framework of risk there are also opportunities, not discussed in the report. In a future blog, I’ll talk a bit about those. The most resilient communities are those that can rise above the risks and grasp the opportunities that they often mask.

The Strategic Foresight Initiative (SFI) takes a national view of a number of emerging trends or “drivers” and their effects on a range of possible futures and suggests 15 essential capabilities that must emerge in the emergency management community to meet the needs of the nation in 2030.

The FEMA Strategic Foresight Initiative is clearly intended to be a long-range evolutionary process designed to anticipate changing conditions to national trends and employ adaptive thinking to identify emerging challenges, requirements and solutions. To accomplish this in a way that is practical and useful to the nation, FEMA must move beyond this first stage of the SFI in three ways:

First, it must continue the current process. The national, collaborative process involving emergency management professionals in a series of workshops, the publication of significant research papers and reports and a continuing effort at dynamic virtual discussion among stakeholders must be institutionalized so that it survives the vicissitudes of Washington politics and becomes an enduring FEMA legacy.

Second, it must expand the input base. While the primary purpose of the SFI is to prepare the emergency management enterprise for an uncertain future, the essential capabilities identified by the process often will be created and implemented outside of the EM community. In the highly interdependent economic, social, and structural environment that characterizes America’s communities, the emergency management function cannot be separated from other community services and functions. Capabilities designed for emergency management must accommodate the broader needs of the community and must operate seamlessly across the full spectrum of national preparedness. This requires an understanding of complex operating environments that cannot be captured through the lens of emergency management alone. Future SFI efforts must address the roles and responsibilities of all sectors of a community.

Finally, it must create whole community observation networks. The SFI took a very bold and innovative approach and examined a range of possible futures. None of the futures considered is likely to be the actual future the nation will face. In all likelihood, the actual future will contain some synthesis of several of these candidate scenarios. The challenge for the SFI will be to continuously monitor emerging trends and their effect on required essential capabilities. This can only be done using a whole community perspective. More importantly, it will be most useful if it is done continuously by a network of linked communities (geographic and communities of interest) with a common purpose and established metrics.

The FEMA Strategic Foresight Initiative along with the Whole Community Approach to Emergency Management represents a significant doctrinal shift in emergency management thinking. This very positive evolution at the national level can be amplified by leveraging the energy of communities and regions and enlisting the participation of communities of interest beyond emergency management professionals.

The other is an even smaller town in Mississippi. In the last ten years, it’s lost a sixth of its residents. Those remaining are among the poorest in the poorest state in the nation. Over the last few decades, its decline has matched the decline of cotton as a cash crop.

Two towns, struggling for existence, each facing their own private disasters; for communities, disasters begin and end alone.

The Kansas town was torn apart in many ways by the tornado. Many buildings destroyed. Many in the town deciding not to rebuild. Others, among them the mayor, using the tornado as a wakeup call – an opportunity to reinvent themselves. The remaining leaders of the community deciding to aim to become the hub of the Green Revolution. They built a new City Hall to the strictest “green” standards; they formed a foundation to reinvent themselves as a “Model Green Community.” They envisioned Eco-tourism as their new foundation. Big Media hailed them; the press hounds came sniffing for their stories and wrote their praises and then left them, once again alone.

The Mississippi town experienced no sudden shock – just a slow acid drip eating away at their economy and their vitality. And they knew it was happening. They watched with pride as their favorite son went off to Ole Miss to become the best football player in the state. But like so many other young and not-so-young, he didn’t come back home. Every year, the cotton gin – one of the main reasons for the town’s existence – got less and less business as the Delta’s deep loam was converted from cotton to corn and soy. The press never came around. The slow death of yet another sleepy cotton town isn’t really news to anyone, least of all the people living there. They knew they needed to find another reason for being, and persistently searched for it. But they never could find it, alone.

The people in the Kansas town and the people in the Mississippi town have each proved their resilience many times over. Though they have seen their towns contracting around them, they have refused to give up, and continued to look for reasons for their towns to be reborn. They desire their towns to return to the vitality they all remember, or think they remember, or want to remember. But they can’t make it happen alone.

In Mississippi, the townspeople know they live in one of the poorest towns in one of the poorest counties in the poorest state in the nation. The incomes of the people in the Kansas town are generally well below the national average. Even after the tornado, the fraction of vacant housing is greater than the national average. There’s not much need for an advanced education in either town. Neither town is rich in resources, but both have a quiet pride in their heritage. And so they go on, alone.

These are two real towns in our nation. The townspeople are good and decent people with a dogged resilience that all of us can admire and seek to emulate. But there are tens of thousands of towns like these across rural America. Contracting towns surrounded by contracting counties, losing those they can least afford to lose to cities with greater opportunities.

This is a somber tale. Two towns – one still hoping, though the tide seems to be against them; and another whose hope is almost gone. Both searching for a reason to be reborn, but searching alone.

If we are to realize our dream of recapturing the resilience we remember, the first step I think is clear: we must reach out both to the towns torn by tornadoes and those whose lifeblood is slowly dripping away. We must help them find new purposes, new reasons for being. We must be midwives to their rebirth, or they will die – alone.

So, with further apologies to Peter King, let me share three things I think I think about Doomsday Predictions (he always has 10 things, but I’m clearly more focused than he is!).

1. I think I think Change doesn’t equal Doomsday. At the most basic level, the purveyors of fear are playing on our very human resistance to change. No matter our state of intellectual, social or economic development, all of us want our own little worlds to stay the same. We may not like them; intellectually we may recognize that they would be better if only X; but we generally accept real change only after every other possibility is exhausted.

If we look at the examples I’ve noted above, each seems to threaten violent upheaval to our lives. But do they really? If Europe implodes, it will certainly impact our economy, but most of us will simply gripe about our 401k’s becoming 201k’s, and move on. I would submit that Peak Oil has already been reached, and we’ve found new sources of oil. Sure, they cost somewhat more, but we are adjusting, and actually finding a very credible substitute in untraditional sources of natural gas. Global Climate Change is probably occurring, but it’s happening slowly and our coastal communities, in particular, are adapting to it. Washington is dysfunctional, but eventually we’ll work past the gridlock and do the things that need to be done to unchain us from the Deficit, and preserve the safety net for those who need it. That’s what a resilient people does – it copes, and adjusts, and adapts to change.

And sometimes, along the way, we find that the changes we feared aren’t all bad. For example, influenza viruses don’t stand heat very well. Our very warm winter has resulted in of the mildest flu seasons in memory, and, somewhat surprisingly, very little mutation in the dominant strains.

2. I think I think my community is my backstop. But, you might ask, how do I cope with a change while We are learning how to cope, adjust, and adapt? The answer is community. I am a big fan of Rick Weil’s work on the recovery of various groups after Katrina. What he points out is the importance of connections – having our own community – in helping us cope with even devastating changes. Through our connections to others, we can leverage their psychological and material strengths to help us cope. By lending our strengths to others, in effect we exert some control over change, and through that control assuage our own fears.

As I delve ever deeper into Resilience, I have come to believe that in our well-intended desire to help the unfortunate, we have lost sight of this important point. Providing money, Food Stamps, whatever, as we do now doesn’t help the unfortunate become more resilient – more able to cope, adjust, adapt. Our current impersonal systems aren’t constructed to help them form the real connections we all need so that we can feel that we have some control over the changes in our lives. John McKnight, in The Careless Society has discussed this better than I; well worth (re-)reading.

3. I think I think community resilience is really about managing change. Four years ago, when CARRI began learning about community resilience, our mantra was “Anticipate, Limit Impacts, Respond, Recover.” If we think about it, we could shorten that to “Manage Change.” A resilient community tries to understand what the future world may look like, so that it can anticipate what changes it may be facing. A resilient community assesses itself, to see where it is in terms of vitality, resources, and strengths and weaknesses. It tries to buffer itself against the threats it may face face, and evolve in a manner to take advantage of opportunities the future affords.

A resilient community does this as one, involving as many in the community as possible, and from all sectors. It thus builds its internal connections, so that when unexpected adversity arises, it has the ability to rapidly respond and recover – to cope, adjust, adapt. Thus, in a very real sense, community resilience is all about managing change.

As a result, I have avidly followed the series of reports from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (initiated by the Brookings Institution). What the data seemed to show was that New Orleans’ “New Normal” was about 70-80% of what it had been prior to Katrina. The number of houses with no inhabitants has ballooned. The number of jobs has gone from almost 250,000 prior to Katrina to under 200,000. Compared to the other Brookings’ “Weak Cities,” New Orleans seemed to be falling even further behind.

But then I decided to look at the data another way. Instead of looking at totals, I looked at the numbers per capita, and at some of the trends most often overlooked. They tell a very different story.

Per capita income is up, in fact throughout the entire metro area. If we look at the fraction of the population living in poverty, it has dropped precipitately in Orleans Parish, while increasing nationwide. On a per capita basis, the average citizen of New Orleans is no longer well below the “Weak Cities” average in terms of median household income, and in fact is now above this average.

Then I looked at a few other trends. The level of air pollution has fallen dramatically since Katrina – the number of days with poor air quality per year is less than half that of the years 2004-6. Perhaps most startling is the huge jump in the number of arts and cultural organizations per 100K population in the parish – almost doubling since Katrina.

I could shrug off the economic numbers by labeling them an artifact of all of the funding coming in to rebuild the city – and we can’t really discount that. But the jump in arts and cultural organizations, and my own subjective impressions of a restored social fabric in almost all of the city’s neighborhoods turned my thoughts in another direction.

Panarchy is a term applied by Hollings and Gunderson to describe the dynamic adaptive cycles of ecological (and, often, socio-ecological) systems. According to this elaboration of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, systems periodically go through phases of destruction, and then reorganize themselves in ways that allow new structures and processes to take root. As a result, they can then grow in new and unexpected ways. Though the concept has virtually no predictive power, it has been successfully used to describe the growth, death and rebirth of a wide variety of ecological systems and human organizations.

So are we seeing the slow recovery of a non-resilient New Orleans, or a panarchic reorganization of the city into something better than before? We probably won’t know for a few more years, but we can hope.

There is considerable anecdotal evidence that people don’t really value or take ownership in things that come too cheaply. If you tell me how to solve my problems and pay me to do it, it’s not really my problem. Communities are not significantly different. Communities that want to improve their resilience to disasters of all kinds must be committed and mobilized for a long term journey. The pay off will be great but the task is not likely to be accomplished quickly, easily or by outside experts. In short, the community must discover the challenges themselves and take ownership of the solutions.
Despite tough economic times, communities have a lot or resources. What they often lack is a coherent plan to mobilize them. Here are a few ideas:

Start small and celebrate every success. Many things that create resilience don’t cost money. Organizing to build close knit neighborhoods with internal networks that share information and resources in times of crisis is practically free. CERT training is readily available. Creating ways to facilitate discourse among the public, private, faith based and non-governmental communities before crises can be incorporated into the everyday life of the community at little or no costs. Publicize and build on every organization and neighborhood that adopts and creates activity around resilience. Get conversations going within the community, cultivate them and let them grow.

Use volunteers and make every participant feel important. The graying of America should produce legions of volunteers with substantial skills and loads of time. Mobilize them and make them feel critical to the community’s success. Some pretty influential campaigns have begun with soccer moms. People want to be a part of something. Give them a chance.

Enlist the private business community and don’t forget the small businesses. No one has a greater stake in the community’s success than the private business community. No matter how big they are, if they don’t have workers, they don’t have a business. No matter how small they are, if they don’t have customers, they don’t have a business. No matter how big or small they are, they have resources – people, time and money. It’s in their self-interest to apply some of those resources to the community.

If you have one, get the local community foundation involved. They exist to do good. No matter their focus, something in the community’s resilience action plan will interest them. Get them involved from the start and let them own a part of the solution.

Finally and maybe most importantly, demonstrate commitment to building a resilient community and show that you have a coherent plan to get it done. Everyone wants to work on a well-planned, flawlessly executed, winning project.

First, a word of background. The growing divide between rich and poor has been a burr under my saddle for a while. My more liberal colleagues see something inherently evil in it. I don’t, particularly when the remedies proposed essentially amount to confiscation in the name of “Fairness.” However, I sensed that there was something unhealthy lurking behind the statistics. I had finally concluded that it wasn’t the disparity in incomes but rather the separation within the community that the disparity produced that was unhealthy. It wasn’t that the rich are evil and the poor the modern version of “Noble Savages,” but rather that the two were no longer communicating. And a community that is not communicating within itself is asking for nasty surprises – and is not very resilient.

Enter Murray. He portrays an America with a vast divide between the richer 20% and the poorer 30%. The richer typically live lives straight out of the ‘50’s (yes, kiddies, I remember the ‘50’s). Almost everyone in the 30-49 year old cohort works. Illegitimacy is rare (7%). Parents work too hard – at everything, including parenting.

The poorer live lives that are increasingly disconnected from the community. More and more are leaving the workforce, even in good times. Almost half of their children are illegitimate. To quote Brooks, they are “less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.”

The one thing they both share is that they are unlikely to come into meaningful contact with each other. The richer live in quiet, clean, safe neighborhoods that reflect their essentially conservative values. The poorer live in noisy neighborhoods, where the trash may not be picked up, and they may not venture outside their doors too often out of fear. It is hard to become involved in community, or even personally productive, in these circumstances.

Brooks goes on to show how Murray’s work contradicts the myths of both the left and the right. I won’t go into that, but recommend it to you iconoclasts in this political season.

You may have noticed that I referred to three tribes in the title, not two. The reason, of course, is that both Murray and Brooks ignore the Third Tribe – the vast middle. Fearing a fall into the poorer, but dreaming of joining the richer, this tribe is the essential glue that must hold the other two together. But even here, we find disturbing trends. A recent study found that the rate of upward mobility is slowing down, and the number who go from the middle to the very rich is dwindling. Our educational systems are downplaying and in some cases eliminating the national and community mythologies that can bind a community together. As a nation, we are engaging in more “anti-social” – anti-community – behavior – too many activities that don’t involve direct interactions with others. And many of the Great Middle are turning inward because of unemployment or underemployment or wages that are lower than a decade ago, another toxic residue of the Great Recession.

Ultimately, money is neither the cause nor the solution to this splintering of communities; it merely facilitates the process. But how do we reverse the process?

I’m afraid there are no easy answers. However, I think we do know what victory looks like. It is a community in which even the poor feel a stake in its future. It is a community where everyone sees the entire community, the same community, both the good and the not so good. It is not a Community Triumphant smug in its righteousness, nor a Community Suffering with no confidence in its future, but rather a Community Militant that employs its strengths to shore up its weaknesses and to create a better future for all.

With that vision, there are several paths to take. Breaking down the barriers that retard social mobility are important. As the poor rise, they can bring the memories of what they’re escaping with them. As the rich fall, they can bring their work ethic and sense of community with them. Developing common myths – stories about the community that reinforce its uniqueness and its unity – are important. Fostering activities that all of the tribes will participate in is important. Encouraging the poorer to get involved in their neighborhoods, encouraging the richer to get outside their enclaves and to see the world through others’ eyes are important.

This splintering of America threatens to unravel the fabric of our communities. Murray (and Brooks) have performed a valuable service by holding up a mirror for us to see what we’re becoming. It is up to us to act on what we’ve seen.