I still feel like I have to archive most of the advice, since I have *yet* to come up to something where I’d use it. I’m so torn between following a traditional sort of career for a while or just chasing down my freelancing dreams… I’m hoping to make a move in the next few months that will allow me more time to work on developing those freelancing skills. (I really like the “portability” of a freelancing career, especially if my husband’s going to be career military.)

Still, networking is something I’m trying to work on. Just joined twitter to help with it, but I still always feel like I come off as insincere when that’s so not how I mean to be!!

Any advice on how to fix that? Or figuring out what value you can provide people? I know it’s important, I just suck at coming up with these sorts of ideas. I’m better at implementing….

It is a myth that the 19th and 20th centuries were times of “rugged individualism” rather than community. Fraternal organizations, ethnic organizations, unions, guilds, neighborhood associations, churhes and extended families were all far stronger then than they are now, and people actually depended on them.

My nieces and nephew may be on Facebook and MySpace and send relentless inane WUU2 texts to their friends, but my grandparents were in the Elks or the Masons (and their female and youth organizations like Eastern Star and Rainbow) with their weekly events and lifelong associations. They went to the Polish Hall or Croatian group for their weekly dances or potlucks and their mutual aid societies and their church groups with weekly events. They were in a voluntary union at work or a craft guild or in farming communities the local grange, and they lived in three-generation households often with a newly immigrated cousin or a co-worker boarding there as well. For those who went to college, fraternities and sororities became life-time attachments.

The notion that labor unions are making a recurrence, especially as evidence of greater community, is also bizarre. Labor union membership in the private sector is as low as its ever been (9%).

The only evidence of change is in the direction of greater coercion of workers by taking away their right to a secret ballot on whether to unionize, so that unionization can be accomlished through fear and intimidation – hardly a movement toward greater community. Further, most union activism is centered around trying to get government to rescue bankrupt unionized companies and to take over non-unionized business sectors like health care.

I’m not sure why these authors felt it necessary to distort the historical record in order to make their points. Perhaps contrasting today’s more sophisticated but far more superficial and transitory connectivity with our ancestors’ deeper, more enduring connections would not have been as upbeat a message and so wouldn’t have sold as many books.

May I recommend another book devoted to making and strengthening connections with other people: Personal Village, by Marvin Thomas.

(Disclaimer: I have no connection with the book, its author, or the publisher. I’ve just gotten a lot out of reading it.)