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UCLA Football can play a integral role in building the kind of resilient community that can withstand and even help prevent tragedy.
By all accounts, 2016 has been a rough year. Beloved celebrities have died, hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered homeless by terrible floods, terrorist attacks are becoming commonplace, and we’re far too often confronted with the horror of another mass shooting. This came very close to home in June, when panic gripped the UCLA community amid reports of an active shooter on campus.
Students, faculty, and staff either fled or barricaded themselves in place, preparing for a Virginia Tech-scale tragedy. Ultimately, police determined that a disturbed post-grad shot and killed engineering professor William Klug in his office before turning the gun on himself.
In the wake of these tragedies, we grasp at anything that resembles meaning or, better yet, a solution. We feel compelled to “do something.” Often that looks like long, fitful conversations about gun laws or mental health policy, but even at their most successful, those “somethings” would be the work of experts and politicians. They don’t address the feeling of powerlessness the average citizen feels in the face of unimaginable tragedy and horror.
Anomie
Sociology has a concept called anomie, popularized by Emile Durkheim. It’s a useful term for our times. Formally, it means a condition in which individuals in a society receive no guidance or moral shaping from shared societal norms.
I tend to think of it as what happens in the absence of community, that network of close relationships and shared norms that shape our worldviews, our choices, even our identities. Without community, individuals can only conceive of themselves as purposeless individuals, masters of (and slaves to) their own will.
Anomie, then, is a profound sense of alienation and aimlessness. At the extremes, anomie increases the incidence of people cast adrift without an anchor, the disturbed, disgruntled, and deranged. It’s easier to lash out – be it online or in person, with words or with weapons – when every person is a stranger.
In John Donne‘s famous No Man is an Island poem, he says, “Any man’s death diminishes me, / Because I am involved in mankind, / And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; / It tolls for thee.” Anomie is when no one is “involved in mankind.”
Safety in Belonging
Earlier in my career, I worked for a government agency that sends Volunteers overseas for two years to do international development work. One of my tasks was explaining to prospective Volunteers (and often their parents) our counterintuitive, integration-centric approach to safety and security.
Brett Hundley in the Alamo Bowl: one of the recent heroes of our Bruin community. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
We did not house Volunteers together in a central location for easy safeguarding and monitoring. No, they lived alone, dispersed among the people they came to serve. Volunteers did not have their own cars but took whatever public transportation was commonly used. Aside from the most extreme cases of geographical isolation and vulnerability to natural disasters, Volunteers were not given satellite phones or immediate means to contact home or the main office.
This, unsurprisingly, unnerved a lot of people. But it rests on the core principle that safety comes from belonging and being known. Eat where the people eat. Work with them. Walk and talk and sing and laugh with them. Share in the things they’re passionate about, spend time with them on the things that matter to them.
This allows the local to see the Volunteer as “one of us” in a way that living behind the walls of a secure compound renders impossible. A fact of human nature is that community members are far less willing to harm one of their own than a stranger and far more willing to protect one of their own from harm.
Community Work
This brings us back to that feeling of helplessness and a desire to do something in the face of tragedy. If, alongside guns and mental health, our highly individualized culture is a contributing factor to the spate of disturbed loners who take out their frustrations through mass murder; if belonging to community and being known by others is essential to chipping away at the anomie and making our world a safer place; and if eating and working and walking and talking and laughing and cheering and crying with people, sharing their passions and commitments, is the foundation of community; then we are not indeed helpless – we can do something real.
The denser and more complex our network of overlapping loyalties and commitments, the stronger our communities will be, and the more effective against the anomie. It’s still important to vote, call your Congressman about your preferred gun laws, raise awareness about mental health and treatment options. But alongside those things, and while waiting for them to come to fruition, build your community.
More from Go Joe Bruin
Tomorrow is the start of another season of UCLA Football. In one respect, admittedly, sports are a diversion, a consumer product, a cheaply acquired personality accessory. But they’ can also be a ritual with shared totems, sacred places, and taboos. They tell a story, with legends and heroes, heartbreaks and triumphs that mean something to each person and bind them together in a shared narrative. A la Donne, we are “involved” in Bruin-kind.
There are all sorts of avenues and opportunities to bind yourself to the people around you. It could be church, civic groups, trivia leagues, cycling groups, book clubs, professional organizations, or even just being a regular at a local bar or restaurant. But sports loyalties run deep, and they can span generations. They’re perfect for this kind of robust community.
The next chapter of our shared Bruin story is beginning. If you watch the game at home (330 eastern/1230 pacific on CBS), take a moment and consider the hundreds of thousands of Bruin fans around the country sharing that experience with you. If you make the trek to College Station (or to the Rose Bowl for a home game later this season), meet a fellow fan and bond over the shared purpose that brought you there. When you see a UCLA bumper sticker or T-shirt around town, make it a point to say hi and “Go Bruins!” Turn “UCLA nation” into the UCLA family, and make our world that much better a place to be.
My two-and-a-half year old daughter’s favorite part of the 8-clap is when we get to yell, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Fight that week’s opponent. Fight the Trojans always. Fight the anomie.
Go Bruins.
This article originally appeared on 
