Community Contradictions

I tend to think that community is a kind of contradictory state. To exist within one an individual must give of themselves and take parts of the Other with them. It’s a state of back and forth, a contradictory experience that relies on the self and the selves finding some sort of middle ground. All communities have their contradictions, their between-states and undersides, their rights and lefts, their arguments and disagreements, their pocket communities and outsiders, and their core principles of understanding and shared knowledge. Marion is no different. In fact, it is a very good example of these contradictions. There are systems at work in Marion that leave the poor poorer and the rich richer; more than that there are systems that …show more content…
There are systems at work in Marion that create contradictions: a place that is a wealthy tourist destination, full of beautifully reconstructed Antebellum homes and abundant natural resources, or, through another lens, a crumbling mark of the civil rights movement, where race came to head and a great and influential leader of justice was born but is being forgotten as nothing ever changes. These contradictions, these systems, work tirelessly to separate community. These contradictions build themselves into the very walls of Francis Marion High School, live and breathe in the grand old courthouse. These contradictions live in the retired women who volunteer their time at the Reverie Historic Home and the retired women who volunteer at Lincoln Normal School. These contradictions live in the space between Alabama before the Civil War and Alabama after the Civil Rights Movement, and in the decades since. But below all that, below contradictions and cracks, below divisions and prejudices, below misremembered pasts and hopeful visions of the future, there are people. And in Marion, and in every other community, those people care about each other, and it is the things they share that bring them together, past cracks and splits and divisions so deep that wars have been fought over them. Even as divisions divide them, the people of Marion refuse to give up trying to connect with each other, to make connections