This is a rather meandering post, about a few different things.

First of all, Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia is a vital voice in the blogosphere. If you’re not reading her work, you should be. She’s in a very tight spot right now, so if you have a few dollars to spare, I urge you to consider donating via the Paypal button on her site. (You can read more about her situation here.)

I want to jump now away from Lisa to the broader phenomenon of folks rallying around a fellow blogger to offer assistance in a time of need, something I’ve seen happen quite a few times. It is, in my observation, starting to become standard practice for bloggers to receive some support from the blogosphere when the going gets tough, which I find pretty fascinating.

In my last post, I talked about our need, as humans, for love and support from more than one person — in essence, our need for community. Community performs a lot of different functions; in the last post, I focused mainly on our social and emotional needs, which are of course very important. At an even more basic level, though, community meets our daily physical needs for food and shelter. What does it say about the state of community today that the blogosphere, of all things, steps in to support people?

(Once again, I’m talking about big-picture phenomena here, not the specifics of the life of any person but myself.)

To me it says that, for a lot of people, the blogosphere, and other non-geographic communities, are the new neighborhood. Instead of having a neighbor to bring over a casserole during a hard month, many of us have, instead, a wide circle allies and readers to click on a Paypal button. (Or, if we’re lucky, maybe we have both.)

It’s great that people have that support. That kind of network is critically necessary; I’m very glad to see the blogosphere step up to meet that need where necessary. What’s interesting to me is that it is necessary — that, for many people, the networks that are presumably more immediate than blogland are either nonexistent or, more likely, just inadequate.

This does make some good sense. Neighborhoods (and, before, villages and even towns) used to be collections of people who shared a culture, complete with shared values, worldview, lifestyle and experiences. Today, many neighborhoods* and other Earth-bound populations in industrialized countries are basically random assortments of people who have nothing more in common than the fact that they live on the same street. (This is not always true — there are still some thriving, supportive neighborhoods around. I’ve never set foot in one, though, and I don’t think my experience is particularly unusual for a middle class US-American.) These neighbors are often, but not always, in roughly the same economic strata. But the real glue of communities is usually totally absent: shared principles, priorities and worldview, shared identity and experience, shared culture and history. It makes perfect sense that my neighbors are basically strangers to me — we have very little in common.

Contrast this to a grouping like any given subset of the blogosphere — the queer blogosphere, for example, or the circle of progressive Jewish blog(er)s, or the online community of women of color feminists. Here we have, instead, a group of individuals who have self-selected for very similar interests, goals, opinions and values. Amongst the group there are typically many people who share an identity and/or similar experiences, not to mention language. The glue of community is there.

As we would expect, these communities function better than many neighborhood communities, and, for that reason, step up to the plate when community support is necessary (as it often is). It’s wonderful that people are crafting solutions to meet unmet needs, even if it is lamentable that the needs are going unmet in the first place.

More lamentable than the erosion of the neighborhood, though, is the related phenomenon of the loss of culture. My girlfriend and watched Fiddler On The Rough this week, so I’ve been thinking even more than usual about this, about the worlds and ways of life that we have lost: that I personally have lost, and that have been lost to countless peoples around the world, in the many tides of war, change, revolution, genocide. Some of these forces are horrible — genocide — and others — change, for example in the form of freedom movements — are very good.

But it’s a strange and complicated sort of problem. How do we move towards justice without eroding culture? Is it possible? How do we change for the better without irrevocably damaging our traditions? My life is better than those of my ancestors — I’m not poor, I’m comparatively free of restrictive gender roles, I can love (and, I hope, marry) the person of my choice regardless of her gender or ethnicity…

But these freedoms come at a price. have an unshakable sense of who I am, culturally — and yet much of that culture is missing from my knowledge. I ache for music and traditions and a language that are lost to me, for a country that shares my culture. (That country doesn’t exist, mostly because my cultural identity is a strange mishmash of many things.)

My grandmother mourns that she didn’t get to grow up in her parents culture: the tight-knit Sephardi community in Sofia, where she was born. Instead she was raised around western Europe (Spain, France), largely ignorant of her own culture. There was a permanent, irrevocable gulf between my grandmother and her parents — in some ways, they could never really know each other, never really talk to each other.

My mother was then raised primarily in the United States. Another culture, another unbridgeable gap. In some much smaller sense the same thing happened to me, because my mother and father raised me in a different part of the country from where they grew up. (New Mexico is very different from New England.)

No one understands this pain better than my grandmother, and yet she does not understand.

“Let’s go back to Europe.”

Where it would only happen all over again, to my children and to me. That world is already gone.

* I am, of course, excluding intentional communities here — they’re the response to this very situation.

Posted under Culture