Community and isolation
This is the text of a sermon, which I titled “Community and Isolation”, that I gave on the morning of January 19th, 2025, at the Unitarian Church of Medford. I offer some of my thoughts on my first year in the City Council. In particular, I discuss community, isolation, and how the weakening of in-person social networks allows misinformation to spread.
Hello — just to introduce myself, my name’s Matt Leming. I’ve been a member of this congregation since 2022. I’m also a researcher at Mass General, a reservist, and I serve on the City Council of Medford.
I was asked to do a sermon here a few months ago, and I thought for a long time about what I should talk about, and I figured that I should talk about something I think about a lot. In the past year that I’ve been on City Council, there are a few topics that I keep meditating on. One is income inequality. I was pretty embedded in a local campaign recently, in which people voted to raise their own property taxes to prevent mass layoffs in the Medford public school system and invest in maintaining our infrastructure. An older woman in this congregation said she voted for it even though she was on a very limited fixed income because she knew it was the right thing to do for the next generation. Another thing I think about is about land use, housing, where people can live. City Council is working on an historic rezoning initiative at the moment, which is foundational for any new growth, building, and commerce in Medford. And I think about the future. Last week, we passed an ordinance to make Medford into a sanctuary city, to protect undocumented immigrants from the incoming administration. All of that is very important work that I’m proud of, but it’s also a bit dry, and it probably isn’t what everyone is thinking about at the moment.
Most of what I think about is people, so I’m going to talk about that. Being in elected office, especially at the local level, people come to me with all of their hopes and all of their frustrations, and it’s a literal impossibility to please everyone. I learned that early on. Medford is a community of both longtime homeowners and renters, of multigenerational residents and relative newcomers, of the elderly and those with new families and those who just came here for a new job in Boston. Geographically, it’s placed between blue collar communities, historically Black neighborhoods, renter-heavy areas in South Medford, and some of the more high-class suburbs in the North.
Historically, the Medford City Council was a stagnant body, and I think I was elected, in part, because a majority of the city was frustrated at this and wanted change. The vast majority of people are supportive of change — older residents have been waiting for decades to see it, and younger residents like to see positive investments in their future. Other residents come to me with legitimate complaints, which we can have a productive two-way dialogue about. But many others wouldn’t be satisfied with any action. And they’re not satisfied with inaction, either. So there’s nothing I can do. Some just want to feel heard. There are some who are scared, and some who are rabble rousers, and I’ve sat through my share of six-hour Council meetings while being shouted at and berated. At some level, it’s healthiest for a person in my position to ignore that and do what the majority of voters voted me in to do. But I can’t ignore it completely, because I have sympathy for them, and, at the most practical level, I can’t ignore the fact that this is not a Medford-specific issue, they all vote, and our country just re-elected an autocrat who will be taking office tomorrow. I think it represents a bigger issue.
During the campaign, I spoke with a political activist who was more experienced than me and gave me his thoughts on the chronic naysayers. His interpretation was that they were mostly people who were lonely. They have a lot of time to post to the internet. They didn’t have much going on, so they spend their days complaining about local politics. In high school, I read a book by the psychologist Carl Jung, called “Man and His Symbols”. In it, Jung said that people have an innate need for a sense of importance. He talked about the mind requiring a sense of importance just as our bodies need air or water. Some people feel important through their occupation, some people feel important by supporting their friends and community, some feel their importance through their expertise on a particular topic, some feel important by being good parents. But those who lack a sense of importance from something real will seek it elsewhere. He told a story of a woman who had been abused and belittled by her husband for years and years before she had a complete mental breakdown. She was committed to a mental hospital, and in the hospital she woke up, every morning, and said that she had just had a baby — having a child does offer a sense of importance. This woman was made to feel so insignificant that eventually she got her sense of importance from delusions.
For the last eight years, just like everyone else, I’ve been thinking about why Trump was elected in the first place. Anytime I think about it, my mind goes back to something that my mother told me in 2016. She said, “Matt, most people go to work, go home, listen to the radio, go to sleep, and that’s their lives. At some point, you just want to throw a brick through the window.” Historically, people got their sense of importance through their community. When you’re in a community, you have influence, you have support. And this was often found through unions, rotary clubs, masonic lodges, churches, and so on, all of which have had steadily declining memberships for decades.
Today, many, many people in the United States and the world feel isolated. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, a report from the Surgeon General said that about half of U.S. adults reported measurable levels of loneliness. One-person households have risen by 15% in the United States over the past 60 years. Back then, while 44% of people used to have dinner with their neighbors a few times a month, only 28% reported this in 2022. Unions used to provide a social fabric for blue collar and rural communities, and union membership peaked in the United States in the 1940s and 50s before it saw a slow, decades-long decline. In 1983, when I assume they first started to record these statistics, 20% of US workers were in a union, while only 10% were in 2023.
As community declines and individuals become increasingly isolated, many achieve their own sense of importance through outbursts, through anger, through conspiracy theories — ideas that make them believe that they’re the ones with the real answers to life’s problems. And it’s very easy for bad actors to take advantage of this mindset, so we need to fight that.
During the tax override campaign that succeeded this past November, I helped coordinate a number of parents who wanted to see their children have better schools. I helped train them to talk to their neighbors, going door to door to meet others and explain why these investments are so desperately needed. But I also saw the effects of disinformation. A small group of developers and people with millions of dollars in property that they didn't want to pay more on, as well as old guard politicians who don’t like to cede power, mounted a disinformation campaign. These weren’t the people on a fixed income, but they pretended to be. And their campaign had an effect — inciting anger and division on the basis of fabrications. But, because of those parents, who knocked on doors and contributed their time and effort, who talked in person to their neighbors, the measures passed.
This isn’t isolated to Medford. Asheville, North Carolina, a city where I lived for six years, was recently devastated by a hurricane. Dozens lost their lives and whole areas of the city were destroyed by flooding. My best friend’s dad was nearly impaled by a tree that went through his living room wall. But when FEMA tried to send in aid workers, they were attacked by a few residents who had been told that they were part of a vast governmental conspiracy.
On a personal level, I have nothing but empathy for people who feel isolated, outside, left behind, angry, lost, or just want someone to talk to. Growing up, I was a military brat and I attended thirteen schools in Virginia, California, Washington state, and North Carolina. As a child, I don’t think I was mentally equipped to be uprooted that often. I was the outsider, and for years I didn’t have a single friend in school. It doesn’t feel good to be lonely, and being lonely makes one feel unimportant, and that can make a person act out. It was only later, through trial and error, that I learned how to build a community in new places and make friends, and that’s why I value it so much today.
When I first came to Medford, I didn’t expect to stay for long. With the economic situation my generation and coming generations face, we’re always incentivized to uproot ourselves and move on, especially in a place as expensive as Greater Boston. I became involved in affordable housing work around Medford, and I learned just how many residents here wanted to make things better. This work brought me and a few other activists around Medford to lobby City Council on affordable housing initiatives, and I quickly learned that, while politicians can rarely make change happen by themselves, they can easily block it, so you do need good elected representatives. But, often, good people, even if they have the time, energy, and capacity to run, are too busy doing other good things to run for public office, and that leaves a vacuum for the not-so-good people. So, even as a relative newcomer with very little money in the bank, I decided to try it out.
Since that run, much of my job has been to battle the effects of misinformation. As a scientist, I try to reason with those people who disagree with me, but what I’ve come to realize is that logic, facts, and data are not nearly as important for this as in-person social networks. Most people form their views based on community, what their neighbors think, or, these days, what they’ve read on whatever communities they’ve been directed to on the internet. For all of its historic problems, America did used to be more social. People used to have more of an in-person community to fall back on. I don’t want to make the mistake of looking at the past with rose-colored glasses — on MLK day, we’re reminded that things used to be a lot worse for a lot of people than they are today — but the fact that people used to have more in-person interaction is verifiably true. Without this regular interaction, people can become isolated and vulnerable and easily taken advantage of by bad actors.
If I had one critique of my generation, it’s that we’re a bit too picky about what we choose to be involved with. We’re mistrustful of organizations in general these days. Don’t be afraid to put your time into an organization — a church, a volunteer group, a social club, anything outside of work or the internet — even if it’s imperfect. And if your neighbors are lonely, or left out, bring them into the fold. They might accept the invitation, or they might not, but invite them.
America’s sharply divided right now, and the next four years are not going to be a cakewalk. Everyone can do their part — political activism, volunteering for an organization, talking to a neighbor who needs someone to talk to. Tomorrow, January 20th will be the four year, two week anniversary of an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, in which we'll invite back, as America’s leader, the very man who incited that insurrection. But it will also celebrate the 96th year since the birth of America's most important civil rights leader, and I'll conclude with this quote of his that fits the occasion: “The line of progress is never straight. For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends. It is like curving around a mountain when you are approaching a city. Often it feels as though you were moving backwards, and you lose sight of your goal: but in fact you are moving ahead, and soon you will see the city again, closer by.” Thank you for listening.
