A First Job for Graduates: Help Make the World Better : Community: The challenge is to act on the local level to join--and soon lead--groups that nourish shared values.

Among the urgencies of life for 1995 graduates, building community surely trails clinching a diploma, acquiring a job or finding a mate. Yet the world is likely to be a better place where the college educated, our natural leaders, make a priority of fostering the health of their neighborhoods and voluntary associations.

Consider that the ties that mutually bound humans for millennia--the web of relationships that characterized village and clan--atrophy in modern conditions. Modern life makes anonymity easy. Indeed, upon moving into her new condominium not long ago, a friend resolved to meet neighbors by hosting an open house. One declined with a polite note signed, “Sincerely, Unit #19.”

Yet where anonymity is the norm we find alienation and distrust, cynicism and anxiety. Conversely, where people engage each other, worries about crime and other social ills abate, voting rates grow, schools are judged successes, and Scouts, churches, and community theaters all flourish.

The rub is that where in pre-modern society village and clan provided the ties that bind, want them or no, we now must intentionally nourish a sense of community. But it’s easy not to, because joining and volunteering take time and frequently cash (not to mention strength, and patience). Anonymous free riders can let somebody else coach Little League. Mobility allows easy breakup of social relationships. Significant relationships are much less place-bound, as work is located outside of neighborhood, often beyond city, even state, and indeed national boundaries. Can love really blossom via the Internet?

So, graduates: A moral imperative has been left on your doorsteps, and the doorbell has been rung by the Michigan militia, Aum Shinrikyo, skinheads, Branch Davidians, Bloods, Crips and others who are quite ready to offer mutuality to a world thirsty for it. And by the way, the bell has also been chimed by all of those anxious to desert urban centers for the presumed sanguineness of life in small-town Idaho or Arizona or, for that matter, Leisure World. The catch phrase for the moral imperative may be “think globally, act locally” (with apologies to the original owners of the phrase).

Acting locally, the job for talented and prepared college graduates is to join, soon to lead, community associations in which and through which people can nourish shared values and offer mutual support. Where YMCAs, senior citizen groups, service organizations, youth groups, religious congregations, school boosters, charities, alumni associations, professional and trade groups, homeowner and condominium associations, and all of their kindred seem too few, the job is to found them. Expect in the context of those groups to grapple with great issues, writ small. How shall children be reared? Kindnesses rewarded? Grievances solved? Through such grappling are values clarified, perhaps renovated in light of modern conditions. Ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong become shared beliefs. Norms come to be imposed by all upon all through the informal means of relationships, advice, conflict at times, ostracism where necessary.

Thinking beyond the neighborhood, the job for leaders of local groups is thoughtfully to engage wider (county, state, national, global) concerns in two ways. One is to enrich those wider debates with the moral senses that emerge from strong communities. (After all, long ago nobody mistook what the values of clan and village were.) The other is to encourage that national, state, even county entities take deliberately into account how their programs may themselves strengthen face-to-face community groups. Let us mount crime prevention, elder care, education reform and public health programs in ways that draw upon, strengthen and preserve face-to-face voluntary associations.

With effort we can foster democracy, reduce alienation, rebuild trust, and escape the anxieties of rootlessness. We can achieve satisfying lives lived in urban California, not in Kingman, Ariz., or Onalaska, Wis.