Last night’s Parks & Recreation double-header gave me a great example for something I’ve been mulling over for some time: the connections between culture, community, and relationships.

Culture and community, of course, are buzzwords in corporate-speak.  It’s definitely true in education, where you can easily find and read books about “learning communities” and cultures of “insert cool term here.”  Culture and community are good words; I know because I have thought a lot about them myself.  Culture, in my mind, is the broadest of the terms.  And while it can include artifacts created by individual, the most resilient signs of culture are artifacts created by collaboration.  Quality collaboration comes from quality community.  And what is community?  It is easy to think of individuals as the building block of community, but I think it’s not that simple.  The root reality of community is relationships, the interplay of those with common beliefs, goals, and actions, people who both like and love one another.  Real relationships bubble up into real community, which bubbles up into real culture.  Anything else is window-dressing and fleeting fad.

Last night’s Parks double-header was a picture of what happens when relationship is inadvertently abandoned and what that can do to those “left behind.”  How wonderfully strange that this was the cause of Ron Swanson’s anger towards Leslie!  What a great use of subtle flashbacks to things we didn’t get to see but that really mattered in the long run!  And what a real struggle for all of us caught up in trying to “make things happen.”  I’ve been there and done that, and I’m ashamed of it, feel my complicity in the building of weaker things.  But I cannot, do not want to, stay there.

Do we want real culture?  Do we want real community?  We can start by striving for real relationships.  It’s probably one of the hardest thing we’ll ever do, the thing we’ll fail at the most.  But we can try.

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For more on culture, check out J. D. Hunter’s To Change the World.  Even reading just a few pages of it might help you think more clearly about culture and the world around us.