{"id":551,"date":"2016-05-27T10:34:26","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T15:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/thedorothyoption\/?p=551"},"modified":"2016-05-27T11:00:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T16:00:58","slug":"jungers-hunger-and-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thedorothyoption\/jungers-hunger-and-ours\/","title":{"rendered":"Junger’s Hunger, And Ours"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Sebastian
Sebastian Junger. Image in the public domain.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

A couple of years ago, I took some members\u00a0of a large Rwandan\u00a0refugee family to a St. Vincent de Paul store nearby. I was accompanied by a Rwandan\u00a0friend and translator, Jeanette Akimiyimana, herself a\u00a0refugee who has been in the United States for ten years. As we pulled away from the triple decker where the family had been placed, Jeanette began to chat with one of the teenaged girls in\u00a0Kinyarwanda, the principal\u00a0language of Rwanda. Before long they were laughing and the pace of conversation had reached breakneck speed. \u201cWhat did you say?\u201d I asked Jeanette. \u201cI asked her if she was depressed yet,\u201d she replied, laughing. \u201cEveryone who comes here from Africa gets depressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jeanette went on to point out\u00a0that American society is characterized by detachment\u00a0from extended family, community, culture, and all the other things that contribute to\u00a0identity in more \u201cprimitive\u201d societies. \u201cIt\u2019s all about money in America,\u201d she said. \u201cEveryone is an individual. Everyone is on their own. People don\u2019t matter. That makes you depressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought about Jeanette\u2019s insight today while listening to an NPR interview with Sebastian Junger, of The Perfect Storm<\/em><\/a> and Restrepo<\/a><\/em> fame. His newest book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging<\/a><\/em>, is about the difficulties soldiers have reintegrating back into American civilian life following wartime service. Junger, who studied cultural anthropology at Wesleyan, locates this difficulty in\u00a0the loss of a shared identity, a meaningful collective mission, a unifying set of beliefs and goals. In short, the loss of community, or as my friend Jeanette put it: \u201cEveryone is on their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Listen to Junger\u2019s interview with On Point host Tom Ashbrook<\/p>\n\nhttp:\/\/sg.wbur.org\/download.php?url=http:\/\/audio.wbur.org\/storage\/2016\/05\/onpoint_0526_sebatian-junger-on-vets-and-their-tribe.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Junger uses\u00a0uses soldiers as a lens, but Tribe<\/em>\u00a0isn\u2019t really about the military at all. Rather, it\u2019s a critique of American society, which by its very nature fails to provide returning soldiers with what they loved best about military life. And it\u00a0isn\u2019t just a military phenomenon; Junger notes that returning Peace Corps volunteers often have the same experience. Whether soldier or peace worker, the return to the United States is very often an occasion for psychological fragmentation, depression, and sometimes suicide. Junger says that this is the price we have agreed to pay for the wonderful benefits of \u201ccivilization,\u201d which we increasingly define in purely\u00a0material and technological terms.<\/p>\n

This absence\u00a0of community and the crisis of identity it spawns is in my view the ground for our\u00a0toxic\u00a0culture of depression<\/a>, drug abuse<\/a>, pornography<\/a>, and other forms of escapism. It accounts for everything from widespread gender dysphoria, a feature in\u00a0the decadent stage of every civilization, to\u00a0the longing to \u201cmake America great again,\u201d and even the popularity of tattoos, especially among the young. (James Howard Kunstler has written, \u201cTattooing has traditionally been a marginal activity among civilized people, the calling card of cannibals, sailors, and whores. The appropriate place for it is on the margins, in the back alleys, the skid rows. The mainstreaming of tattoos (on Main Street) is a harbinger of social dysfunction.\u201d)<\/p>\n

For his part, Junger has long hungered for a deeper, more fulfilling connection to community than what he experienced growing up in the small town of Belmont, Massachusetts, which has the distinction of being both the official residence of Mitt Romney and the birthplace of the John Birch Society. Junger begins Tribe <\/em>this way:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
The sheer predictability of life in an\u00a0American suburb left me hoping\u00a0<\/span><\/span>\u2014\u00a0<\/span>somewhat irresponsibly\u00a0<\/span>\u2014\u00a0<\/span>for a hurricane or a tornado or something that would require us to all band together to survive.\u00a0<\/span>Something that would make us feel like a tribe. What I wanted wasn\u2019t destruction and mayhem\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0but the opposite: solidarity.\u00a0I wanted the\u00a0chance to prove my worth to my community and my\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>peers, but I lived in a time and a place where nothing dangerous ever really happened. Surely\u00a0<\/span>this was new in the human experience, I thought. How do you become an adult in a society that\u00a0<\/span>doesn\u2019t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a\u00a0man in a world that doesn\u2019t require courage?<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Of course, communal identity and shared purpose don\u2019t guarantee\u00a0peace, and social solidarity\u00a0is often\u00a0purchased at the expense of the scapegoat, the victim. In American culture, the word \u201ccourage\u201d is often invested with a martial meaning and \u201csacrifice\u201d associated with war. Which is why only an authentically Christian community, one characterized by nonviolence, love, service, hospitality, and generosity of spirit can satisfy the \u201clong loneliness\u201d we all experience. Such a community is an icon, a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, our true home and desire.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, I took some members\u00a0of a large Rwandan\u00a0refugee family to a St. Vincent de Paul store nearby. I was accompanied by a Rwandan\u00a0friend and translator, Jeanette Akimiyimana, herself a\u00a0refugee who has been in the United States for ten years. As we pulled away from the triple decker where the family had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2570,"featured_media":559,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,8,11,5,31,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community","category-works-of-mercy","category-dorothy","category-mark-gordon","category-peace","category-radical-christianity","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nJunger's Hunger, And Ours<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A couple of years ago, I took some members\u00a0of a large Rwandan\u00a0refugee family to a St. Vincent de Paul store nearby. 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