Alienation marks American society, particularly among younger citizens of Generation Z and Millennials. (Cigna, U.S. Loneliness Index) While we value individualism, too much leads to isolation and alienation. Freedom can morph into despair. (Remember singer Janis Joplin defined freedom as a feeling of nothing left to lose.) Underlying this societal malaise is a loss of any sense of community. People feel this sense of detachment, anomie, drift and separation because they do not identify with any community and lack the shared social bonds of a local community.

A community is an inhabited place where people have a sense of a shared culture and history. Famed German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies distinguished between what he termed Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft worlds. Gemeinschaft is marked by a communal sense based on shared emotional bonds. Interactions are of quality and frequency. The Gesellschaft world is impersonal. Gesellschaft is associational, contractual based on functional, artificial and transactional groups created to achieve a specific utilitarian purpose. Such a society is large, divided and mechanistic. Groups are based on self-interest.

In order to achieved Gemeinschaft, you must invest in your local community. Investing time and energy helps create feelings of membership. You feel you have earned a place in community. The more work you put in the more you receive in return. Something becomes yours when you put labor in it.

Community is marked by a sense of:

A. Belonging, identification, relatedness

B. Mattering and recognition

C. Integration and needs fulfillment

D. Emotional and symbolic connection

E. Relational sense of community based on a shared history and culture

The question becomes how to recreate a sense of community (Gemeinschaft) in a Gesellschaft world. How to recreate in the 21st century a sense of community that incorporates new technology, diversity while still maintaining an interpersonal sense of relatedness? How do we overcome an impersonal Gesellschaft world of despair and alienation with a Gemeinschaft world of connectedness. Is community permanently lost?

There is one place where a shared sense of community, Gemeinschaft, still thrives—New Iberia. Community is here, in its full sense, waiting to be recognized and rediscovered. But it takes effort to connect or re-connect. Given that a sense of community is built upon a shared culture, history, location, sense of place and embracing of local diversity, we must reach out and actively join that community. We must energetically seek community. Our search can begin by connecting to those organizations that protect, nurture and educate in all those senses of our community, including the Bayou Teche Museum, the Iberia African American Historical Society, the Iberia Cultural Resources Association, the Shadows and IPAL. The parish library has abundant programs about our local community. Join these groups; go to their events. Reconnect. Reconnect with the sense of the commonplace. Get involved. “The world is so empty if one thinks only of large cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.” (Goethe)

Dr. John W. Ray, a New Iberia native, is a professor emeritus of political science and public policy at Montana Technological University, Butte, Montana. He was born in New Iberia, graduated from Catholic High School in 1966 and still regularly visits home to see friends and family.