Acton Caine, founding member of the Neighbourhood Watch, currently resides in a nuclear bunker of his own design just outside of Motherwell. The files, ‘How2RebuildCivilisation.exe’, were written by Caine in the hopes that the current population would stop seeing their world as a lost cause and instead rebuild it into something vaguely liveable. Please contact Acton Caine when civilisation has been rebuilt successfully, or if anyone finds a blue wool cardigan that doesn’t belong to them. It was from M&S, it’s quite nice.
No man is an island. Obviously. When was the last time you thought about coastal erosion in your self-care regime? What I mean to say is that no-one, on this entire planet, does anything alone. Fixing things will be a team effort and the key to working together is community. Now, I don’t mean community in the way your parish council means it, nor in the way your well-meaning aunty explains why your lovely flatmate Anna keeps coming with you to family functions. I mean Community with a capital C [now realising that joke is redundant when the reader can in fact see the capital C, but I stand by my choices]. Community should be for the collective, the common and the communal – the three Cs if you will. It should try and achieve things that benefit everyone, improve our day-to-day lives and best of all, allow people to achieve them together. Sounds quite nice, doesn’t it?
If you are one of the, I assume, hundreds of devoted Caine-CD-collectors, I am pleased to say you have already found yourself in the foundations of a community. Congratulations! As our little- hmm I mean large coterie shall attest, community doesn’t always need to be local. If some of your band are in the city while others are safely tucked away under 6-feet of reinforced concrete and some strategically placed turf, you can still make good. That being said, if you find yourself living in a new city, say for a job or a university course, try and remember that there are communities all around you that you could be contributing to. We’re a very mobile species these days, which can be fantastic, but it also means we have a tendency to treat all spaces like tourists. No matter how briefly you exist in a space, it’s always well-worth finding some way to connect with the people that surround you. Pick up rubbish, introduce yourself to your neighbours, volunteer somewhere if you can – even small actions make a difference and all the efforts you put in will find their way back to you in no time.
Now, I don’t want to put a dampener on things but alas, community is not all street parties and dancing round maypoles. Creating communities and keeping them alive requires work, effort and compromise. Take our community for example, I’m sure you would love to walk around the bunker, have a go on the Radar desk, read some of my Soviet space manuals and the like. But I don’t want you in my bunker, or ever to meet you in real life. So, you’ll have to be satisfied with a handful of scratched CDs. See, compromise! Communities are like sculptures, not paintings. You can shape and mould what you are given, but you cannot make them perfect. Communities are living, breathing things that have to be adapted to. If you look around you and only see people whose lives and experiences map exactly on to your own, who never challenge you or show you anything new, that’s not a community. That’s a friendship group, or possibly a strange cult. Either way, you’ve got many more people to meet.
But Acton!, I hear you cry, that sounds like a lot of hard work. And yes, my lethargic, screen-addicted friend, it is. But, in this day and age, prioritising community is one of the most rebellious acts you can make. A century of capitalism, of modernisation and a particularly pernicious trollope in a blue two-piece suit shattered and divided the communities that had sustained us for hundreds of years. There’s nothing people in power love more than making us feel like we’re going it alone. Choosing to know the people around you and deciding everyday to support them and learn from them is one of the most powerful things you can do. Community has no immediate reward, but capitalism tricked us into thinking that ever existed. Plant trees that you will never sit under the shade of, knowing that they’ll shelter whoever comes after instead. Build communities for hermits who’ll leave their bunkers when they know there’s someone to talk to. Or something like that…
Logging the scent profile of WD40,
A.C
ENDOFDISC3
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