Shop keepers rent bikes without locks and report that they’ve never been stolen. “We’ve never had a bike stolen in 28 years,” Jackie Sypherd told Hartman. “If you expect the best from people that’s what you’re going to receive.”   They even leave sales items outside all night with money boxes so that customers can make purchases on the honor system – and nothing is ever stolen.

I would like to think that Lake Side is a metaphor for the way we could live together in harmony all over this country if we only could muster faith over fear. We did it once in wide swaths of this land, and I think of the unlocked doors in my paternal Grandparents’  rambling home in Colchester, Ontario, across Lake Erie from Lake Side as well as in my maternal Grandparents’ farmhouse near Vassar, Michigan.  That lasted into the 60s of my childhood  – and I wonder if President Obama’s beer summit was a step in the right direction of bringing trust to a new generation that is far more culturally mixed today.  There’s a lot of argument about whether Obama should have entered the dialogue at all in Cambridge and let it remain a local issue between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley  http://bit.ly/VkDI1.

Perhaps, but once it got started,

the results from the dialogue have been mostly positive, getting the men to meet and talk and getting the country to begin cooling down its hardline positions (although Gates has still reported receiving death threats).  But it also highlighted how the one person who stayed above the racial fray­­– Lucia Whalen, the woman who made the 911 call– was careful to stick with the facts and was nevertheless vilified as racist until the transcript was played on the air proving she never mentioned that Gates was black.  She was not invited to the summit and when asked if she was resentful, Whalen  commented that she doesn’t like beer anyways.

The coop in the news is Group Health and its president Scott Armstrong told the New York Times “There’s a kind of accountability to the patients in our system. And when you bring the principles of a cooperative to bear, patients feel responsibility for holding the system together and for their own health.”  I would add that the sense of responsibility he speaks about results from the fact that co-op members actually own an equal share of the business.

In fact, Paul Hazen, President and CEO of the National Cooperative Business Association wrote recently that it’s time to remember that cooperatives thrived in the great depression.   Cooperative credit unions, for instance, founded back in the 30s, are remaining stable in this uncertain economy. Remember the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life?”  It’s not just about the spirit of sharing during the holidays - the battle between the values of a small Savings & Loan (not a coop, but a family-run business) dedicated to its customers pitted against a runaway Bank culture (yes, there are great global banks) focused only on the bottom line, resonates in today’s economy.

Even if national healthcare eventually ends up as a government plan, I’m glad the spotlight right now is on cooperatives.  We need to help each other get through today’s hard times and cooperatives offer us a way to get started on that journey!