Sharing Similar Values and Positively Adding to the Community
The second requirement you should meet if you wish to be considered for membership in our community is in two parts.
First, we must mutually agree that we have a congruence of values. Second, you must be able to become a net positive addition to the viability of the community as a whole.
Let’s talk about each of these points some more.
Sharing Similar Values
We don’t have to think identically about all things – indeed, the chances are we probably don’t – even long time happily married spouses don’t always agree on everything. But, continuing that analogy, one thing that long time happily married spouses definitely do exemplify is tolerance and respect for each other’s views and opinions, and an ability to accommodate the other person’s values and to happily compromise.
Now, we know that sometimes the phrase ‘sharing similar values’ is used as an oblique way of making various racist statements. That’s not the case with us, at all. We are completely ‘color blind’ in terms of things such as racial origin. As long as you’re comfortable with a value system which is very much as originally espoused in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and as long as you place greater importance on self-reliance and actively being responsible for your own future, rather than passively believing that you have a right to be supported by others and actively demanding such support, then the chances are you’re ‘our kind of folks’, no matter what color skin you have, what accent you might speak English with, or anything else.
Needless to say, because we honor all US laws, you need to be lawfully resident in the US in order to join a Code Green community.
We are a community founded on Christian values, and while we welcome you whatever your faith, or for that matter even if you have no faith at all; if you belong to a faith with values radically different to the Christian values, and/or if you belong to a faith that supports the violent overthrow of Christian values, you’d probably not be a good fit.
The point about faith is an interesting one. Make no mistake – the times ahead will be difficult and trying times, and we’ve noticed in the historical record that communities who have some type of belief in a higher purpose or goal or meaning tend to be better able to cope with challenges than communities with no spiritual compass or direction.
The flipside of this is that if you’re dependent on medications (prescription or otherwise) for your personal stability and sanity, we’d prefer you not to take this any further. There are two reasons we say this. The first is recognizing that in the future we plan for, there’ll be no ongoing supply of such medications, and the second is that we want all people to be capable of positively adding to the viability of the community as a whole. Which leads to :
Positively Adding to the Community
What do you have or what can you do to help the viability of the community as a whole? What skills, experiences, talents and abilities do you have? To put it bluntly, how will you ‘earn your keep’ every day?
This need not be a deal breaking issue, but it is something you need to think about and be able to explain. Our community needs to be exclusively made up of ‘worker bees’, we have no space for drones, and even less space for queen bees!
If you have few skills to start with, that’s not a deal breaker. If you’re willing to learn, and if you’re willing to work hard, even at relatively unskilled tasks that need manual labor, that’s good enough. But we don’t owe you a living, you have to be able to pull your weight and earn your keep.
We do make exceptions to this requirement. If you have very young children, or very old relatives, they are welcome too. Children are our essential future, and all healthy societies invest in their children to protect their future. As for older folk, we again see a positive correlation between societies that respect and honor their senior citizens and the success of the society as a whole. Older community members can participate in light duties and when the time comes, need not participate at all, subject to one consideration.
A normal society works on the basis that it first invests in a child’s upbringing, then gets a return on the investment as the child becomes a productive adult, and the productive adult then, directly or indirectly, by producing more than he/she consumes, invests in turn in a future retirement. But our community, when it starts, won’t have already received the benefits of 30 or 40 productive years from retirees, so it is harder to immediately accept you and excuse you from all obligation to contribute and participate.
There are two ways around this – if you come with younger family members, then we consider you as a ‘package deal’; if you come alone, we evaluate what types of light duties you could assist with, and we also allow you to buy your way in to the community.
Buying your way into the community is something anyone can do, of course. If you both buy your immediate share of the community and then capitalize for a future return of food, shelter, energy and support, that works for us and hopefully for you too. Right now, cash up front is as valuable to establishing our ongoing viable community as is a person with essential skills we’re desperate to add.
