Peck - Crisis and Community

Here, however, is the passage I was looking for when I picked up Peck again

"Genuine communities of a sort frequently develop in response to crisis.  Strangers in the waiting room of an intensive-care ward suddenly come to share each other's hopes and fears and joys and griefs as their loved ones lie across the hall on the 'critical list.'"

"On a larger scale, in the course of a minute a distant earthquake causes buildings to crumble and crush thousands of people to death in Mexico City.  Suddenly rich and poor alike are working together night and day to rescue the injured and care for the homeless.  Meanwhile men and women of all nations open their pocketbooks and their hearts to a people they have never seen, much less met, in a sudden consciousness of our common humanity."

"The problem is that once the crisis is over, so - virtually always - is the community.  The collective spirit goes out of the people as they return to their ordinary individual lives, and community is lost.  yet community is so beautiful that the time of crisis is often mourned.  Many Russians speak with great feeling about the brutal days of the siege of Leningrad, when they all pulled together.  American veterans still remember the muddy foxholes of World War II, when they had a depth of comradeship and meaning in their lives they have never since been able to quite recapture"

"The most successful community in this nation - probably the whole world - is Alcoholics Anonymous, the 'Fellowship of AA'....As with the victims of a natural disaster, AA starts with people in crisis.  Men and women come to it in a moment of breaking."