STARS+CLAP+INC+VOL+6

COMMUNITY
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
When I was a kid, we took a plate
of food to our neighbors in need, we
welcomed new neighbors with
cookies and we borrowed sugar
from next door if we ran out. We
ran freely around the neighborhood
until the street lights came on and
Mom always knew we were safe
because everyone looked out for
each other. The elders policed our
neighborhoods from the front porch
and the back yard as our aunties
and uncles and parents and
grandparents sat in the evening over
a glass of tea or lemonade and
recalled the stories of how the
neighborhood had been “when they
was coming up” and discussed their
joys and struggles of the day, and
kept us all in line in a quickness for
disrespecting ourselves, each other
or our community. Saturday was
spent with the men in the
community helping the guy down
the street get his car running before
work Monday morning and the
women cooking dinner and making
enough that everyone had a plate.
Sunday was for church and BBQ's
that traveled from neighbors house
to neighbors house each week, as
we ran around catching firefly's and
throwing baseballs, not catching
attitudes and shooting bullets.
Everyone knew each other, trusted
each other and worked together to
ensure the well being of the entire
neighborhood.
Fast forward to 2016. We have
cell phones and facebook to
make it easier to communicate
all across the world, at any time
day or night. The internet made
it possible to learn and
experience things some of us
may have never had the
opportunity to see, but with
such amazing developments we
have stopped developing our
community and started
developing social media
networks. We get on line and
talk about our relationships, our
joys and our struggles, often
with people we have never met
and likely never will, yet we
wont reach out to the person
in our community we see
everyday, we dont even hive
time to make a phone call but
we can tweet and text. We feel
lonely, or sad, have a beautiful
moment or great success and
share it with no expectation of
human contact on our timeline,
and wonder why our younger
generations lack emotion,
empathy and love. We have
become so consumed with our
networks, we have lost our
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