A Nation of Weavers

Our politics and society seem these days to be coming apart at the seams. Discord seems to rule the day. But some of our opinion leaders are trying to do something about it.

David Brooks

One of these leaders is David Brooks, opinion columnist for The New York Times. His recent column "A Nation of Weavers" says, "The social renaissance is happening from the ground up." Brooks tells us about an initiative he began several months ago, at the Aspen Institute, called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. The intent of Weave is to support "people around the country, at the local level, who are building community and weaving the social fabric."

In so doing, they are implicitly addressing the "problem underlying a lot of our other problems": social isolation. The radical fragmentation of our society into tiny like-minded groups and alienated individuals calls for something that can knit the society together again. Something that builds community rather than feeds hostility.

Michael Gerson

Washington Post opinion columnist Michael Gerson heartily endorses Brooks's ideas in "David Brooks wants to weave America’s threads back together." Gerson says, "In the work of lighting candles to push back the darkness, Brooks wants to be a lamplighter."

Thomas Friedman

These ideas about how we ought to respond to the many political crises and hubbubs we see today are echoed to a degree by New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman. In "Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)" he talks about "complex adaptive coalitions," and he refers to them again in "Is America Becoming a Four-Party State?" The idea here is that "business, labor, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, educators and local government [can] all network together to create jobs, attract businesses, grow housing, fix potholes and improve schools." In other words, improve our lives, the way governments and powerful people are failing to do in today's poisonous political environment.

In an age in which every event in the Nation's Capital drops a nuclear bomb somewhere else in Washington, it's nice to see that this "creative destruction" is making space for local movers and shakers to come together to find inventive ways to rebuild their suffering communities.