By Garrison Frost

In the local arena, particularly in the media, one encounters the word community with nauseating regularity. This is as true in Albany and Iowa City as it is in Torrance and Redondo Beach. It's probably just because we're alert to trends in the local discourse that it occasionally seems as if the pervasive use of the word is a particular characteristic of the South Bay.

Partially because of this frequent use (think of what has happened to the word nice) and partially because of its cynically wishful and downright laughable application, the word has lost all meaning. Community is easily the most overused, misunderstood and downright misleading term one is likely to encounter.

The dictionary will tell you that community is defined as a group of people defined by mutual location or interest. Sometimes the community is just a place. In the parlance of our local discourse, the word has acquired an unexplained positive association, much the same as values, traditional and patriotic. So, just as a traditional practice is better than a simple practice, so too is a community process better than a process, a community event is better than an event and a community leader is better than a leader. This is all contrived; there's nothing in the dictionary to imply that community is better than non-community. That's something we added.

But why did we add it? Perhaps we needed a sort of feel-good shorthand. Or maybe we needed a code word to signal to others who are of similar ilk. Either way, the additional meaning is a substantial change, but one that has not been thoroughly explored or explained. And so the meaning of the word remains vague and nebulous.

The use of the word community is particularly risky when one uses it after the name of a city, as in "the Manhattan Beach community" or "the Hawthorne community." The implication here is that everyone in the city is part of one big happy family, but that is rarely the case. In Manhattan Beach, for instance, there is a palpable tension between the equally large sections of the population that have lived in the city for more than 15 years and those that are new. This tension reveals itself in myriad issues such as development, schools, taxes and traffic regulation. But this is just the beginning. In any city, one will find people of divergent interests and backgrounds. Trying to aggregate these people with phraseology is simply wishful thinking. Moreover, it encourages the type of parochialism that regularly makes people of one city resent those in another.

Every once in a while, one encounters a construction such as "the real estate community." What is your average citizen to make of this? Real estate agents are a notoriously self-interested group of salespeople. Theirs is a profit-driven business, and their interactions with each other are competitive and exclusionary. There's no community here. But then why use the word? It's public relations, nothing less, an attempt by a group of car salesmen to portray themselves as being linked to the interests of everyday citizens. This is just one example of how the use of the word community is often used to mislead the listener.

The next time you see the word community in a newspaper, a Chamber of Commerce brochure or an election mailer, ask yourself what it really means. Most of the time, it means nothing, much the same as lazy speakers insert the word like into their sentences. Other times, its use is much more manipulative. It's a shame, because it used to be a pretty useful word. Now, it's in danger of being yet another one of those words that just takes up space.

(March 31, 2004)

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