On Community

 This is going to be a hefty topic for me. 

It’s plagued me my entire 20s. 

And I’ve tried not to drown in wondering if it’s just because I am in my 20s that I don’t feel I belong anywhere, and if it’s exclusively a symptom of my mental health or trauma, and if it’s my right to even indulge in this conversation. 

But it isn’t exclusive to any of those parts of me. 

It’s part and parcel of my fundamental understanding and approach to so-called community. (I am using so-called because I don’t like the word anymore, myself). 

I’ve spent all of these years of my life wondering if it’s me and other people like me, while simultaneously not wanting to get swept up in an endless existential dread the size and likes of a white man whose entitlement covers damn near the entire world at this point. 

There are many a self professed loner that would stew and spew on and on about the world being a steaming pile of shit and seeking to do nothing about it but spend time in the self drawn trenches, navel gazing and nauseously expecting the world to conform to them at every which way and turn. 

That isn’t the loner I’m talking about here. 

He’s had his movies made about him and is not welcome here. 

It isn’t just the world at-large as a sucking void that’s the problem. 

It’s the societal relationship - at least in America as I don’t wish to speak for other countries - to the idea of community. 

And perhaps, in that way, it’s the idea of community. I do believe this to be a bit of a stretch but I will leave it here to make my point.

That all of our conceptions of community are inherently hierarchical and diseased. 

Here in America, we compartmentalize every conception of every little thing. And when we’re tired of that ceaseless compartmentalization, we throw away the whole damn thing. The thing becomes something to break free from and in need of saving or salvaging, brick by brick, board by board. But what if the whole house in which we hold these compartmentalizations is rotten, so much so that the rebuilding or the throwing away doesn’t matter because it’s all happening in this rotten house? What if they need not a house but a human in which to exist? 

When I beat my head around the ideas of community, it is always around these two novel ideas: 

Are we a community of individuals?

Or are we individuals in a community? 

One presupposes that the idea of something bigger than ourselves and myself creates space for us/I to exist in and relate to each other because we have individual personalities that speak to the greater good, or even the greater human experience as defined by said group. 

The other presupposes that individuals create a space that is comprised wholly of them, as in a circus of mirrors where said individuals define and decide the course of the group for their own selfish purposes but branded in the context of selflessness because they are, well, in community with each other. 

Both are, to me, full of pretense. 

I will indulge a person that might use this language, but the ideas are pretentious to me. 

Both aim to create space for -certain- individuals and -certain- community, proximity, and likeness which ever way you slice it. 

And this dualistic framework that finds itself thinking it’s ever so clever flipping of words means the conception and whole foundation is so very different from the other is as American as it gets. 

They are one in the same, and anyone that works in dualistic frameworks is duping themselves and others with that duper’s delight of a smile or experiencing a manipulation that shreds my soul into a million tiny shards. I’m trying not to used exaggerated words here but I do find it truly disgusting. 

Community is a rotten word to me for this reason, while I recognize it’s a nice word for others. 

But I am sick of having to find each other there, always on the flip side of words that conceptualize themselves outside the actual human experience, as lived, daily, by us humans that I think know better than the pretense of theory. 

(We are, of course, the creators of theory but I posit that we do that for inhumane reasons that don’t serve us as humans. That’s not to say that theory holds absolutely no importance, but I would view this more as wrestling through our deepest understandings of humanity, not theorizing. I am not interested in theory outside of practice, theorizing humanity outside of practicing it.)

We loners are the ones that are jaded by this ridiculousness, and often bitter about the taste it leaves in our mouths. 

It’s a dichotomy that pats itself on the back for achieving nothing of value but for those it deems worthy of value. 

In community, you are deemed of value if you

1) provide a service 

2) show up regularly to social spaces that are labeled “community” or “purposeful” 

3) seek to change what you don’t like or shut up about it

4) if you aren’t going to shut up about that change, you must then o-r-g-a-n-i-z-e with other people that draw boundaries as their own community within community 

5) if you are going to organize, you must then sword fight and never ever complain about how futile the fight is or how draining of your energy it is because that is noble

6) once you’ve earned your nobility card, you now have the power to have power over others, even if you profess you don’t want it, and your use of that power will earn you value until you are discarded and new value desired of you

If you want nothing to do with this value assigning, if you want to exist in full human form, ugliness and all, if you want out of individuals and community and community and individuals and want deep in to the human experience as it is lived now and daily, you are a hypocrite, lazy, selfish, un-American, and worthless to society. You can hold no value in your human space existing with other humans. 

“Community!!!” “America!!!” “Us!!!” they’ll say. 

I must pause here and make goddamn clear that this is NOT to sympathize, again, with capitalistic power structures that ask us to ignore parts of our identities because we are all so -human-. We all hold precious, very precious parts of ourselves and the most marginalized of us deserve a fight, deserve change, deserve a better America, and deserve to be shown up for consistently. 

What I AM saying is this:

If we beat “community” and “individual” over our heads, we are going to get a concussion. We already have one. 

I speak for no one but myself and that is the whole entire point. 

I am white, I am able bodied, I am financially/class privileged, and I have many privileges that I cannot ignore in my responsibility to enact change for a better world. 

But I am not those things in the vacuum of community or individual or some combination thereof. 

I am those things in humanity. 

I can trace them through my humanity and you can trace them through yours, and that is all there is. 

There does not exist space for you and I that is above human, that I believe. 

For if there were, we might be able to shadow box with it and conceptualize around it as if it is an ever flowing well of some ethereal knowledge outside our human experience, like how we are forcing ourselves to exist right now. 

I know that privilege exists because I am human and I am capable of knowing what I know as a human. 

You are, too. 

And I must here pause again and again make damn sure that I am making CLEAR that taking away the work marginalized folks have created so that my white ass (as one part of my privilege) can understand my privilege is really fucking shitty. I am not aiming to do this here. I am aiming to say that other humans recognizing that humanity has some fucked up shit going on and that I am responsible for that and that it is irresponsible to forget my own humanity in caring about others humanity is all there is. Conceptualizing systems and even conceptualizing itself - not healthily existing together  - is the problem, the very core of the problem. 

I do believe in dreamers that dream in terms of humanity, but I do not believe in conceptualizers theorizing themselves out of human experience simply because we have a consciousness. 

And yes, we MUST show up for one another and yes, consistently. We must make no bones about doing what needs to be done. We must do it because we are humans. 

Not because we are community, not because I am saying all this and you are supposed to be inspired, not because I am, perhaps, “someone.”

If you are inspired or experience something positive, then you are. 

If you detest my words, then you do. 

And you will gaze at my words and others human experiences with a distant curiosity because we can only exist in the space of community, right? And in the context of social media and online etiquette? 

And we won’t be allowed to have human exchanges with each other, those heart to hearts, those moments where I feel real and you feel real because that is too intimate, too vulnerable a human experience? (Please do be very, very wary of those that seek to manipulate through words like these - they aren’t being the most human and they are conceptualizing around that navel gazing, nauseous duality of “needs met and needs thwarted so I will draw a false line where you aren’t allowed to question intention.” Its ugly and certainly skepticism and protecting your humanity are part of being human!)

I want collective experience with the loners, the people being people, faulty and all. The ones not falling for the battering hammer of community forcing its hand into our affairs, demanding power outside of humanity to drive our affairs. 

We can organize, sure, and perhaps we should. We must enact change. 

But I don’t believe in community anymore. 

I believe in collective, in acts of solidarity, in daily motions that I can recognize as the most real and the most human. 

I’m not interested in your (the objective your) fluff and your community that will, by design, always -and I mean always- leave people out that don’t want any part of community but of human experience. 

I hope all communities crumble into this and out of their toxicity, with no pretense as to the struggle they “endured” to get there over time and in painstaking increment. That is absurdly unfair to ask of anyone, individual or community. I am not interested in your spectacle you will make far too late, though I will be there when your awakening happens, and it deeply pains me that community gets to decide the very nature of being human, in disgusting dualistic fashion. There is nothing outside the human experience that humans need be concerned with for the good of humanity. We are already one and our return to understanding that, to manifesting that, to embodying that more deeply in our humanness and doing that together - THAT is what I am interested in.