skeletrender:

“There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let’s not kid ourselves: we don’t have communities.”

— The Broken Teapot, Anonymous

I see this quote so often and to be honnest, I HATE IT. Not the first part, that part is okay. But this part:

Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most
extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels,
losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same
as dying.

What this literally says is: we don’t have communities because we aren’t dependent on each other for our survival. The punishment isn’t high enough. We aren’t coercively forced to stick together no matter what.

If that’s a ‘real’ community, then yeah, no thanks, I’ll pass.

Mourning the time when communities were more solid because exile was
deadly sounds a lot like mourning the time when marriage lasted a lifetime
because

divorce was highly stigmatized and women didn’t have access to income. In both cases, people stayed together because there was more effective coercion. Which is, ya know, not good. Don’t romanticize that.

I want better communities. I want activist communities where we support people going through hard times, even if they last for years. Communities where housing and feeding each other and picking someone up at night when the bus got cancelled is something you do even when you’re pretty tired yourself. I want communities where we put effort into helping each other become better people at our own pace, instead of relying heavily on call-outs that require an immediate appropriate response to avoid exile. I want communities that embrace imperfection.

But I want us to build those communities because they’re good places to live. Not because we’re coerced into them.