My Latent Family

When professor Coppock spoke about latent interest groups as ones that had a lot of potential but were very difficult to organize, I couldn’t help but think of my family. Just for some context, I have 2 parents, 9 siblings, 6 in-laws, and 25 nieces/nephews. We make an interest group of our own in which membership is made possible by birth or marriage, but only those who really buy in (invest time, energy, and oneself in other members of the family) really reap the benefits of being part of a family. Those who buy in end up making many various connections in fields ranging from pastoring to beer brewing, as well as receiving the great benefits of community and endless entertainment from some very eclectic people. However, even organizing those who buy in to this group is extremely difficult because of a few problems. 

This biggest issue is communicating a single message to every single member in a timely fashion. One of my brothers got married this past weekend, and the process of gathering together every single child, sibling, and cousin (totaling about 50 people) together to take a few pictures took about 15 minutes. When my brother’s wife’s family (about 12 people including cousins) gathered for their photo with the newlyweds, it took them a little more than a minute to get everything straightened away. As a latent group, it took a lot to mobilize my family to do a single task for a few minutes. As soon as the pictures were taken, everyone scattered and it became nearly impossible to do anything together with every single other member present. Even gathering everyone together for the wedding weekend was extremely difficult, as we had two families coming from overseas and someone should have taken the lead in coordinating all of our actions. However, with no centralized leader established (as there would be in a privileged group), we had to resort to using a group text to determine who would do whatever needed to be done (airport pickups, child watch duty, etc...), which often led to miscommunications. 

However, by the end of the weekend, all the seemingly insurmountable challenges of mobilizing my latent family were totally worth overcoming for the wonderful benefit that is the joy of each other's company.