Community: "Like a Rock" Original

Candie Sisk
Professor Lolly Smith
English 101
16 February 2007
Community: “Like a Rock”
Many contributing factors are involved in the formation of a community. It would be simple to take the surface traits such as place, time, or density of population to categorize a city. In fact, looking slightly deeper at things like religion, ethnic background, or wealth would also do little to help understand the true bond and complex energy a community feeds its residents. In order to figure out the source and intention of the energy, it’s necessary to figure out what the simple and complex factors have in common. How do location, ethnic background, and dinnertime stories all help individuals, intertwine their lives and bring them together as a community? Community is constant. Community is stable. Despite other people’s separate lives, community is the one element that can bring them together and provide a cause for joy in the common ground they all share.
Common ground can, understandingly, be described through a metaphor everyone on earth can relate to. In Rosario Morales’s Ending Poem she makes a reference to herself as a leaf on a tree that was grown in the soil of her homeland. Taking the tree reference further, it would be safe to say that everyone is born from the same “dirt.” A tree could perhaps be location. Several branches of culture on a location make a diverse city with several bunches of branch communities. Smaller branches become families, and eventually one will find they have become a perfectly distinguished leaf. Even after the leaf is fully grown, the branch holds all the leaves together in the same way a family holds all individuals together. The main branch holds all the smaller branches together in the same way common factors such as location, religion, or ethnic background holds many groups of families together. The trunk of the tree will hold all the smaller groups in a community the way an entire city will accommodate a diverse group of people. Above all else, the ground will still be intact with roots no matter what goes on above, just as all humans originate and end the same way. Thus, a broad sense of community, from a neighborhood to the human race, is the ultimate form of stability.
Stability for some comes in the form of a house or a car. For others, it may be a steady job or the city they have grown up in. Although many people may look at community as something as plain as location, the complete meaning of community would be lost if it were thought of solely as a destination. For example, in the early 1900’s, New York City was home to many immigrants from countries such as Germany, Ireland, and England. Although their homes may have been far apart, they all found separate centralized communities in the same general city where their way of life could be accepted and shared. In turn, this allowed many of them to live as they had back home, make their adjustment to America easier, and provide them with an opportunity to better their situation through methods routine and acceptable to their culture: all of this, consequently, stabilizing.
Maya Angelou, in Reclaiming Our Home Place, makes a different point on location. “One of America’s worst race riots occurred in Atlanta, in 1906, yet today it is home to many African Americans who choose to live there happily. . .The Civil War was fought all over the South, and alas it is still being fought in some people’s hearts.” Maya Angelou, in making her point about community, sent a powerful message that insisted the people around an area and the attitude of people in the time shape the attitudes and actions that make a functioning community. In Short; the time, place, and occurrences are all stabilized by the community’s choice of actions and attitudes.
Everything from attitude to location to religion to age group can influence a community, but no factor changes the sense of stability any and all communities can, do, and will always create. History shows that a single location will not always provide the same stimulating community, and present day shows that a single sector of people will not always have the same attitudes and in turn will not create the same community. Overall, community gives a sense of belonging. Belonging which gives people purpose for their actions, feelings, and words. Actions, feelings, and words created out of a collection of values and family stories. Values and family stories that originate in the community. Community is a lot more than surface traits. It’s a place to go back to or look back upon when everything born out of it fails. It’s square one. It’s constant. It’s the stability. . . “Like a rock.”