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One word which appears often these days is
community,
and seldom does it emerge in the
traditional sense of a group of people dwelling in the
same locality.
Instead, we read of the military community,
which
girdles the globe, opposing President Clinton while he gets
support from the gay community
and the lesbian
community,
communities that spread from San Francisco
to Northampton, Mass.
Or we hear that some members of the scientific
community
have thrived by guzzling alpha-tocopherol,
but stodgy residents of the medical community
refuse
to endorse vitamin E -- perhaps because the claims are
hardly proven, or, if they're valid, then how could it be
in the medical community's interest to have you healthy and
thereby not spending money at the doctor's office?
These non-geographic communities may develop because people can't figure out what geographic community they belong to.
Once, when I was chatting with Bob Ewegen at the Post, he asked if I planned to write about some hot political issue in Denver.
No, I replied, since I didn't live there and I didn't think it appropriate for me to comment.
That doesn't stop some people,
he said. We get
these long and passionate letters, and when I check the
return address, the writers often live in Littleton or
Thornton, even though they think they live in
Denver.
Well, their interests are in Denver, they're in the Denver phone book, and they may get their mail at a Denver address. Is it their fault that the Colorado political map is an overlapping patchwork of cities, towns, counties, enclaves, school districts, sanitation districts, fire districts, water conservancy districts, recreation districts, improvement districts, enterprise zones and similar contrivances that require you to hire a lawyer if you want to find out what community you're in?
But every place can't be as weird as Colorado, and so
there must be more reason for this recent preference for
legal community
or feminist community,
as
opposed to Cherry Hills Village
or
Smeltertown.
During the innocent and supposedly euphemistic '50s of
my youth, the lesbian and gay communities dare not speak
their names, the medical community was know as the
powerful physicians' lobby which views all public-health
measures as the first step toward socialized medicine and
eventual enslavement by the godless Soviet butchers,
and today's military community was the
military-industrial complex.
So most of the current popularity of community
is
doubtless the result of heavy work by various spin doctors,
who subtly persuade the media to use silvicultural
community
rather than lumberjack lobby,
clear-cutting complex
or sawyer special-interest
group.
Skeptical reporters might challenge the self-serving claims of a lobby or special-interest group, but who would be so cynical as to question the motives behind a heart-felt request from a community?
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