Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Equitable Work Sharing

[Kay Argyle (kay.argyle]

> Would you accept the argument that anybody that doesn't spend 20 hours
> a week improving their model train layout has low standards and a weak
> work ethic?  Maybe you just aren't excited by model trains.
> If person "A" cares about model trains but no one else does, then only
> person A should work on model trains.  

This is a suitable example only (1) if the community has agreed that it
requires an improved model train layout and that it is a community task, and
(2) if there are consequences to the community.  Not likely, but
theoretically possible - maybe building custom layouts for model train
enthusiasts is how the community pays the common house mortgage.

I'm talking about fulfilling commitments, not engaging in hobbies.    

It isn't my ambition* to have the property on a garden club tour, merely for
the bricks of the central path not to be full of weeds when prospective
buyers are looking around or a reporter takes pictures for a story on
cohousing. 
(*well, perhaps an occasional wistful fantasy ...)

It offends my pride to be the one of the shabbier places in our slightly
run-down working-class city neighborhood - not exactly an overwhelming
standard.

If someone doesn't weed, then their two-foot-high redroot pigweed sows its
seeds all over my yard, or the runner grass from the next garden bed invades
mine.  They fail to do a little work, and now I have a lot.

Forget twenty hours.  When the community has committed to some project and
called a work party, it would go faster if people who say they can only stay
for an hour spent more time working than they do leaning on a tool handle
chatting - and that's the ones who show up at all.

> As long as nobody is getting
> sick from unhygenic conditions, there is little basis on which to call
> one preference right and another wrong.

Negative impacts begin long before that, but if you want to set the bar that
high -

The kids used to have "play structures" (a.k.a. old mattresses, tires,
carpet scraps, broken chairs, cardboard boxes, and plastic bottles)
scattered around the property.  Some people objected to these "eyesores."
Further, it was pointed out that it provided great habitat for rodents, who
can carry hantavirus, not to mention rabies and bubonic plague (all endemic
to Utah).

(The same people who were supporting the children's "right" to their forts
didn't tolerate trash like that inside their own houses, yet, if it was
outside where other people had to look at it, somehow it was okay.)

So what motivated the community to clean up? the community value of beauty?
surely a concern for health?  

Sorry. It was a letter from the city saying that we were in violation of
ordinance, and if we didn't deal with it immediately, they would, and send
us the bill.

Utah has not one but two holidays in July involving fireworks. If you aren't
satisfied with the selection legally available, you can head up to Evanston
after bottle rockets and roman candles - the state border is lined with
fireworks stands.

Most of the community's four-and-a-half acres is unirrigated.  Annual
grasses, puncture weed, and Canada thistle sprout in the fall, flower in the
spring - and die.  July in Utah features 100-degree days at 30 pct humidity.
All that dead stuff gets crispy.  

This summer, two Utahns died because they couldn't outrun a fire across a
field.

Surely it must be a concern for fire safety that has, more than once,
mobilized the community to get out there with mowers and weedwhackers?  No,
it was more of those letters. As it is a function of government to keep
people from killing themselves or others in stupid ways, the city
understandably cracks down on any property with tall dry vegetation before
the fireworks go on sale.

It ought to take something less than the threat of the law to get people off
their duffs.

Kay