& what is "community"?
I ask that in all seriousness. I'll listen to your answers but I am likely to not agree with many of them I think. Because community, a false sense of community, is what I have fallen out with perhaps the most people about. And maybe I'll come back and talk about it later. Or maybe not. Who knows.
3 comments:
I thought I lived in a community, I though my neighbors looked out for you and that it was a safe place to live.
when I started having problems and being threatened I thought I could ask and recieve help from those neighbors....
thought wrong.
apparently they miss me. the neighborhood problem remains unresolved and I would not want to move back there even if it was.
Oh, lord, what a sore subject. I think I stopped thinking about it, or never did much think about it in terms of where I lived (because I've always been so transient) until I lived where I live now, and clearly I associate the word with living or existing from a holistic perspective, with a day to day dependence on our neighbors - that's not quite right (I'm thinking out loud) - a symbiotic relationship requiring some sort set of agreed upon social mores that.... ack. OK, a group of people who have to play nicely enough to be able to support each other such that no one family remains isolated.
Having babbled through all that, the word is used to describe other gatherings of people that come together on a fairly regular basis... blah blah blah, I think of church next but that's probably part of the same villiage community in a lot of ways.
So to Clairesgarden's point, we've lost that for a number of reasons, or it's become so dysfunctional as to be barely recognizable. I'm thinking of the neighbor who nearly pushed me down her stairs when I came to deliver the news about her deceased cat. But that's just a symptom.
That's just a start and I notice where and how we live is the first place I thought of.
A "community" *a disparate set of people held together by common purpose* works best as a combination of extended kinship ties and common religion. It works specially well Christianity, which was designed to build community at it's core in spite of a lot of 501 (c)3 crap that passes as Christianity.
Where we live, on the Oregon coast, we are trying to build community in an rv park. Go figure! It's rough. People behave badly, even under the best of circumstances. It works well when there are a set group of people with servant's hearts that are willing to overlook a lot but also willing to stand up and say no when they are in danger of being overun, especially by the inevitable sociopaths attracted to community as easy prey.
Did that make sense, lol?
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