Description

So what community do we belong to today? There is the national community, the country to which we belong. We are American, Canadian, British or Ghanaian or Mexican, etc. There is the regional community, where we might identify ourselves as coming from the west coast, the prairies, the south, etc. There is the metropolitan community, where we might identify ourselves as from a particular city like Toronto or Cincinnati. We reside in an city neighborhood or a suburban town, each of which has a certain reputation or social standing or historic identity. But at the end of the day, we still don’t know our neighbors. The need to belong to a community still exists, however. It is a powerful human urge. Ryan Messmore suggests that young adults are searching for a sense of community and place to belong and are turning to the government to fill that need, looking for programs and policies to create community instead of relying on natural association between neighbors and people who meet. (Messmore)