Piece 4 Intro: Writer's Choice

As soon as I finished writing this piece, I knew that is was my best work so far. When writing, I often wait for some key stroke of inspiration before I start. Once I have that inspiration, I just start writing and continue until that inspiration runs out. Usually I end up stopping about halfway through, and then I have to wait for the next flash. Once I've gone through two or three of those writing sessions, I finally look back on what I have done and see what is worth keeping, what needs editing, and what can just be wiped away. In the case of DB entries like this one, I would usually end up erasing everything I had and restarting several times in order to get a single post.

However, on this post I wrote everything in one go and when I finally looked back on it I found no editing to be done at all; it was a finished product. Even sections where I reference the article, like 'The "Paradise Spell", as Brooks calls it, causes us to constantly reach towards utopia' and am merging in Brooks ideas came without hesitation. I didn't even really need to book, after reading the article twice I instantly could remember the sections that mattered to me and that I needed to include. This may not be my best work, but it is the work that I feel best represents my writing skill and not simply hours of editing until I get lucky and find some combination of words that works well.

Piece 4: Communities Accepts Us For Who We Are

It is not exactly that communities accept us for who we are, but that we seek out communities that will accept us because they are similar to who we are. At least that seems to be Brooks' view on the matter. As he point out, "in the age of great dispersal, it becomes much easier to search out and congregate with people who are basically like yourself". Those of a similar nature are more likely to get along better with each other. America is famous for its diversity, but no matter how different people are, there are always others like them. Those that don't mesh well with their community, or simply grow tired of it, move. Brooks notes that 14.2 percent of Americans moved in 2002, a much higher percentage than most other countries. Perhaps that is because in America, "you don't have to travel very far...to see radically different sorts of people". People are constantly changing who they are and what they desire, an effect Brooks attributes to the American Dream. Our goals in life are always greater than what we have; we strive to find someplace better than where we are now. So as far as Brooks is concerned, its not even an issue of whether the community accepts us, which they do, but whether we accept the community, and for the most part, we don't.

Some could view that as a flaw of America, that we are unable to settle down, not just in our location but in every aspect of life. "Americans switch jobs more frequently than people from other nations." The "Paradise Spell", as Brooks calls it, causes us to constantly reach towards utopia, to find a spot where the grass really is greener. No community is perfect, but since what we desire is perfection, it is hard to allow ourselves to stay in one community. We seek out communties of people like ourselves so that we can be accepted, but then our desire is to become better than our neighbors, and we move on eventually to try and improve ourselves. The community accepts us for who we are, but so often we end up rejecting it.

<Taken from Community DB #2>