Is there such a thing as “the” community?
BRADENTON, FLORIDA – Two friends and I spent Sunday evening at a local skating rink videotaping a Bradentucky Bombers roller derby match. Bradenton seems to be developing its own roller derby community. There’s already a strong one in the Tampa area, just to our North. And this is just one example of a local community or subculture that gets only scant notice from major media outlets. There are plenty of others, even in a small city like Bradenton, Florida (population 60,000).
You’re familiar with Dirty South rap, right?
You’re not? That just shows how white-bread you are. Not that there’s anything wrong with being white-bread; I’m white, 54 years old, and a classical music buff myself, which is as white-bread as you can get. But I’m also fascinated by the many cultures that surround me, especially those that don’t get a lot of outside attention, and it seems that Bradenton is a hotbed of Dirty South rap creativity.
I need to get out to one of the local public golf clubs, vidcam in hand, and talk to some of the golfing community, too. Golf is very big in this part of Florida, but many public courses are being plowed under to make room for overpriced tract housing. The golf culture here — at least its working-class segment — is under siege and may not last long if development continues at its current rate. I hear that due to the increasing shortage of public golf facilities, greens fees have climbed to the point where many senior citzens on fixed incomes can no longer afford to play.
Several years ago I wrote about Florida trailer park culture on my personal site. That article has drawn well over 50,000 pageviews (and had dozens of comments attached to it before I made some site changes in mid-2006 and lost all of them). I think that article has proven so popular because there is little news coverage that mentions trailer parks here unless a crime is committed in a low-end one. Despite the fact that close to 30% of all Manatee County residents live in mobile homes, you almost never see one featured in local papers’ real estate sections, and there is no coverage of the many volunteer activities organized by trailer park resident councils.
Each trailer park is a community. Most have newsletters for residents, but that’s about all the press those communities get. Shouldn’t there be at least one video feature about Bingo night at the Casa Loma mobile home park? This is a major recreation hot spot for retirees — and not just for retirees who live in trailer parks, either.
(Note for non-Floridians: Trailers do *not* all blow away in hurricanes. Most of them survive just fine. But TV cameras never focus on the ones that aren’t damaged. There’s no drama in post-hurricane shots of intact mobile homes.)
Communities all around us
I have given up on the idea of “the community.” A “community” like Bradenton is full of subcommunities and subcultures. You can’t even talk about the “black community” as a single entity. There are black churchgoing groups, black motorcycle groups (and white ones), black gangsters and wannabes, and black entrepreneurs who are more likely to be found at Chamber of Commerce meetings than at black power gatherings.
We have religious communities all over the place around here, ranging from evolution-denying, hands-in-the-air, ultra-Christian congregations to Unitarian/Univeralists and Bahá’ís who believe all humans tread the same spiritual path regardless of their specific beliefs. We have a sprinkling of Jews and Muslims. Again, not a single “religious community” but lots and lots of communities, each centered on one faith or another.
It is possible to be a member of more than one community. I’m sure that somewhere, not far from me, there is a woman who belongs to a conservative Christian church and a motorcycle club, and also loves roller derby. For all I know, she is also into tattoos, and is a member of one of the cliques (communities?) that seems to surround each local tattoo studio. And she might be part of a local Republican women’s group, which is yet another type of community.
Maybe in some parts of America, Bowling Alone is the norm, but around here it’s hard to stay completely disconnected from “the community” unless you work darned hard at it. Even my wife, Debbie, who is as shy and unsocial a person as you’re ever likely to meet, has gotten sucked into the local Village of the Arts community.
Debbie is also close to getting dragged into the local roller derby community, which was founded by a woman who was already a well-known member of the arts community hereabouts.
Indeed, Sunday’s roller derby meet was well-attended by Village of the Arts people, many of whom held signs for “our” team, the Mensa Misfits, and screamed just as loud as the biker-type crowd cheering on the Cutthroat Cuties (who won in the end).
After the roller derby, we went to the nearest bar, roller derby partisanship forgotten, where we all redivided into another pair of communities: Bears fans and Patriots fans, as we watched the last third of the NFC championship (football) game.
When the football game ended, and the long-faced Patriots fans had been consoled, the “citizens video journalism community” (that’s Wheat, Chris, and me) piled into my old Jeep and headed out, worn out, talking excitedly about our editing plans for the roller derby tape we’d just shot, along with plans for the next community event we’re scheduled to tape, and about what other communities and events we ought to cover. What about the community radio community? We’d love to do videos about our two local community radio stations. And one about the local blogging community that gets together (in the virtual sense) at TampaBlab.com. And so on. We came up with idea after idea, non-stop, on our way home.
So many communities, so little time!
