Thanks for visiting (and hopefully joining) the South Jeffco Community Organization. Let me tell you very briefly what the organization is about, and then what I'd like you to do to make it something more than just a list of names on a Facebook page.

The purpose of this organization is to address what I believe to be one of the most fundamental political and social challenges we have in this country: The dissolution of community. Many people, when they know their neighbors at all,  know them only very superficially, and only those very close by. Many factors have contributed to this: Increased mobility, and increased access to like-minded people through an ever-proliferating number of channels other than where we happen to live.

There are plenty of benefits to being able to find people with whom we'd like to spend our time, rather than have to spend our time with whomever chance throws our way. But there are some costs as well. The ideological and cultural chasms that divide us grow deeper and wider and are bridged less. The social resources most immediate to our homes are diminished for ourselves and our children, the latter enjoying fewer mentors and less adult guidance in the course of their daily lives, with many tragic consequences, some sudden and dramatic in nature. And the mutually enriching experience of belonging to a community, where people have some sense of shared identity as well as merely shared proximity, is lost to many.

This organization is an attempt to address this growing social and cultural deficit.

What I'd like each of you to do, to help make this a reality rather than just another pleasant but unrealized aspiration, is to reach out to others in our community, to neighbors and friends, to people who attend your church or have children attending school with your children. Invite them to join us, to recreate something we have lost by an effort of will, and to do something tangible and critical for the improvement of our coexitence at all levels. For "liberty" should never come to mean "mutual indifference," and Reason and Good Will have the greatest opportunity to prevail in our lives when we take down some of the walls that divide us, and open ourselves up to those who are different as well as those who are similar.

Please visit the South Jeffco Community Organization website, linked to on our Facebook page, and sign in as a member. And then, let's cultivate a little "change we can believe in," right here where we live.

-steve.