Theme
12:41am June 11, 2014

soilrockslove:

And another thing about communities… is that community isn’t about being the same, it’s about connections and who cares for who. You can have a community with different kinds of people in it.

Like for instance, some neighborhoods are communities - and not everyone in the neighborhood is the same.  At the very least you have elders and kids living in that community (as well as a bunch of adults all doing different things).  And unless there’s some sort of discrimination going on, you often have different cultural backgrounds, different abilities, etc.

(Sometimes a greater community doesn’t want to care for all of it’s members, so it shoves some aside. And those people band together to take care of eachother and create a new community.  And those people often share something in common.  This is in part how the LGBT community formed.  And sometimes people come together and coalesce around a commonality.)

This is why I feel weird saying I am part of “the autistic community” even though I’m autistic.  Because, of the people I care for *many* are autistic or otherwise ND, but not all of them.  And that’s not the whole of why I care about them.  And we can’t possibly be *The* autistic community either.  We’re too small. :P  And these people are definitely my community.  Or to look at it another way, my community is Tucson. And with ~500,000 people, not all of them can be autistic. :P  Or my community is the Sonoran Desert (or at least a part of it bounded by certain mountain ranges).  Most of the parts of this community aren’t even human!

Or maybe sometimes my community is who needs me, or who needs water at any given moment, or who I need.

Maybe sometimes it’s Life.  Or the World.

This is also why when I do deal with disability communities, I prefer to deal with the developmental disability community, because it is more diverse than any disability community I know.  And communities without diversity don’t feel like communities to me.

Mind you, the autistic community used to be more of a community.  Frank Klein’s cat got cancer and we all pitched in because he was so poor he was selling plasma to supplement his SSI in order to survive.  Things like that happened often.  But a lot of events happened that destroyed trust in the autistic community forever, and it has become less and less of a real community over time.

(To me, a real community involves reciprocal caring for each other in a tangible way.  Regardless of any other consideration.)