You Don't Have to Love the Word

Taylors voted against being a city. Twice. That decision is for the most part settled, and the April piece made the case that the tool we used to solve the first crisis, a water and sewer district, ended up foreclosing most of the need that would justify a city. Taylors has water, fire, and sewer. It does not have a city hall, a zoning board, or a mayor to cut a ribbon.

If the town we are not going to be in is not coming, what exactly is the work?

This piece is the beginning of a conversation aimed at getting at that question. The answer is unglamorous, older than municipal charters, and already underway in rooms most of us have never walked into.

Most people, when they picture civic life, picture a city hall. They picture zoning hearings, sidewalk repairs, and a planning commission arguing about setbacks. Civic life, in this picture, is something a municipal government does to you. If there’s no city hall, there’s no civic life. That’s the consensus for most Americans right now, and it’s not our fault.

But it’s also wrong. Civic life in places like Taylors has never actually run through a municipal building. It has always run through churches, schools, clubs, clinics, fire departments, and the handful of rooms where those people happen to overlap. Cities are one more layer on top of that older layer. They are not where communities come from, and they never have been. The absence of a city hall in Taylors is not a hole. It is a forcing function.

The word for what I am talking about is institution. For the case I’m making here, let's fall back to a very basic version of its meaning: an institution is simply a form through which people do things together. Not a bureaucracy. Not a building. A form.

A family is an institution. So is a church, a high school PTA, and a volunteer fire department. A free medical clinic run out of a donated building by nurses who are not getting paid is an institution. A seventy-five-year-old Lions Club that still meets on the first Thursday of the month is one. So is a brand new Lions club, chartered eight weeks ago and named for a spring your great-grandparents drank from.

Which brings us, again, to Chick Springs. That spring has been throwing off institutions for the better part of two centuries. Churches organized themselves around it. Post offices, schools, and civic clubs did the same. When the spring became inaccessible and the hotels burned, some of those institutions disappeared with it. Others moved down the road and became the beginning of Taylors. A few of them are being rebuilt this spring. That is not nostalgia. That is how places work. That is how they have always worked.

Here’s the problem with that word: when most of us hear the word "institution," we do not think of our neighbors. We think of bureaucracies we do not trust and denominations that have fractured. We think of scandals and retirements and the slow unraveling of things our grandparents believed in. We think of words like "decline" and "legacy". That reaction is earned. Nobody needs to be talked out of it.

But the reaction confuses the institution's condition for its function. The condition of a given institution can be rough, or sclerotic, or deeply disappointing. The function, which is people showing up to do something together on purpose for longer than it is convenient, is still the only way human beings have ever managed to build anything that holds past a weekend. Nothing else has ever worked: not manifestos, not apps, not cities.

There is also a generational tension here. The people who are most hungry for what a real institution offers are often the same people least likely to walk into one that is imperfect. They want a room where they will be known. They also want that room to agree with them about everything before they set foot in it. That is the trap, and the only way out of it is through. Through the awkward first visit, through the people who vote differently, through the meetings that run too long, through the years it takes before you belong anywhere.

The practical version of all of this comes down to three verbs. Join. Start. Restore. Here are some examples to make this clear.

A mile down Wade Hampton Boulevard, the Taylors Free Medical Clinic has been seeing patients who cannot afford a doctor since 2005. It runs on volunteers: physicians and nurses who stayed after retirement, front-desk regulars, and a board that raises money one conversation at a time. Twenty years in, it is still here, and it still needs more hands than it has. That is an institution. You can walk into it next week. You do not have to love the world to take the shift.

In 1993, three people in Greenville looked at the Reedy River and decided they would not let it stay the way it was. The river downtown was choked with trash, mostly forgotten, and the city had not yet turned it into the park that now runs through Falls Park. They did not wait for permission. They did not wait for a plan. They called themselves the Friends of the Reedy River, which is the kind of plain, unembarrassed name people give things they intend to work on for a long time. Thirty years later, they are still pulling tires and debris out of the water every spring. Every "Friends of" group in America begins the same way: a few people and a specific place they refuse to hand over to entropy.

The Chick Springs property, for its part, sat behind a fence for half a century. Last month, a few dozen people gathered on it for the first public event about its restoration in a long time. They were not there because a mayor cut a ribbon. They were there because some of their neighbors had been rebuilding the idea of the place for years, one meeting, one deed search, and one historical essay at a time. That is not nostalgia either. That is an institution being put back together in public, at the pace these things actually move.

The three have a single thing in common. Each was started by people who had no authority to start it, and each became real through the accumulated decisions of neighbors who just kept showing up.

None of this is a clever modern idea. Every civilization that has survived a rupture, and there have been many, has survived it inside the kind of rooms we are talking about. Not inside manifestos, not inside charters, not even inside the cities that come and go with the economics that built them. Communities have survived within churches, schools, guilds, councils, fellowships, and neighborhoods. Inside, the people kept showing up to them when showing up was inconvenient, and who, in doing so, handed forward something they could not have explained in theory.

The Latin word for that hand-over is traditio. It does not mean "tradition" the way most of us use the word now, as a fond look backward. It means placing something in someone else's hands. A community is the set of people who are prepared to do that work: to take what they did not originate, to improve it where they can, and to pass it on. A city cannot do that work. A charter cannot hold it. Only institutions do. Only people do.

Taylors voted against being a city. They did not vote against being a community. The first is a charter. The second is a practice, and the practice happens in rooms with specific addresses, on specific weeknights, with specific people you do not yet know.

You do not have to love the word institution. You do not have to believe every one of them is worth saving. You just have to walk into one. There is a free clinic a mile from here that needs your help. There is a spring your great-great-grandparents drank from that is open for the first time in fifty years. There is a room, somewhere in Taylors, on a weeknight, where the work is being done quietly, without a ribbon-cutting, by people who would be glad to see you.

That is how a community governs itself without a city.

See you in one of those rooms.