Cohousing-L Mailing List: A p.s. to Mandel's piece on politics and coho

['Judith Wisdom (wisdom]

David Mandel posed the oft-struggled about question over whether example can 
expand others, specifically whether coho communities can, by showing how 
to live more sweetly, ravaging the environment less, providing less 
social anomie, etc., move the world around it to a better position on all 
these things or many things that are wrong with our society.  

I shan't go into what DAvid said about Marx and false class consciousness 
and the need for a political party, for this forum isn't the place for 
that I think what we, here,  want to talk about, even if some may 
think it is related.

What I do want to speak to is this:  If coho is to be anything beyond a 
solution for people who are healthy and well-heeled (and there is a 
significant relationship, because aside == a big aside -- from the fact 
that poverty engenders illness, people like me who were financially and 
educationally and culturally upper middle class, when we fall ill become 
financially underclass unless we have stores of family wealth) it (coho) 
needs 
to be able to find a way to include people who represent some of the 
things that occur that society has failed to protect besides the 
environment or anomic neighborhood design/ecology.
 It needs to find ways to demonstrate 
that groups CAN do what many think the larger society should do BUT IS NOT.

Very specifically, had I not fallen ill, given my pre-illness income, my 
work, and my future prospects I could well afford to buy into a cohousing 
community, and very likely would have.  Now, when ill, with savings 
eroded because disability income is utterly inadequate (and when you read 
the early social policy for SSDI you find it wasn't even intended as 
replacement income==as if you were supposed to very early in your career 
have socked away zillions to supplement SSDI in case you got hurt or ill 
and had to leave work) and further socially isolated because of the 
nature of 
current living physical and geist/ethos arrangements and beliefs as well 
as not being able to go out to work and maximally socialize and travel, 
you are not in a position to join a coho community because you don't have 
the jack.  Even though a coho community would for someone like me provide 
such social and dare I say spiritual relief (not religion), or, better 
put perhaps, relief for the spirit.

It's not as if I know the solution for cohos re this problem. But I do know, 
aside from my 
personal frustration, that by not finding a solution (and here I'm not 
speaking of coho ghettos but absorption into coho communities that are 
appropriate for your level of education and cultural affinities) coho as 
an example to expand society is so much more limited.  And despite the 
very and obvious good values and will of many of its members thus sends 
out an elitist message, a message of exclusion.

This is not an attack.  I think this problem, as I've said in earlier 
posts, is a very difficult one.  But David's piece brought up the issue 
of the possibilities and limits of coho as example to improve society, 
and I think its limits for accomplishing that can be immensely expanded 
if it can within itself solve the problem I addressed here.

It then can become a more relevant example of solution, or a broader one, 
or both.  It won't teach Newt, but he is not our student.

Judith Wisdom  wisdom [at] pobox.upenn.edu