5 pages essay

Ervin Cheng

EAD 1-Sec 10

Pro. Akey

2/22/2020

Paper2 RD

Idealized Communities, Or Not?

Community is an indispensable part of people's life. Every person will join many clubs in his or her life, of which family is the most important. When people choose a club, they usually choose according to their own intentions, or they all want to join an idealized club. But real life is often disrespectful, and people may not belong to idealized societies. Or people may see the particular group they want to join as their idealized group. But the reality is often different from the imagination, like Catherine Latterell proposes three hypotheses for communities, they are “communities provide us with a sense of stability”, “communities serve our needs”, and “communities accept us for who we are”. The author explains what real communities are like. Dineaw Mengestu also talks about some trouble of himself in his article, “Home At Last,” when he finds somewhere he really wants to belong. He eventually found his true place, and this community is his idealized. Similarly, in Roland Kelts's article 'The Fifth Flavor,' he chose Japan over The U.S. He should also choose according to his attention. People should also give those three assumptions to find their own community. Because there is a difference between the real society and the idealized society, people imagine too good will lead to people always in a comfort zone. This is a great harm to people. And sometimes people can't completely decide which club they want to join, such as family. So people should wake up to reality. Finally, if people always pursue their idealized community, they will gradually lose their sense of belonging, because it is not easy to find a community that truly conforms to their idealized community. This can cause people to get lost in their own world and lose contact with the outside world.

First, often, people choose a club according to their will, which leads them to idealize a club that is not so nice, or to make a good club that they hate. Man is a very subjective creature. Everyone has their own ideas, so everyone's ideas are different, and their idealized communities are different. But when people choose a club, because the club is their own choice, they idealize the club. A policeman, for example, belongs to a just society, but a just society is not necessarily a good society. There should be frequent incidents of criminals getting away, but he would not let them keep him away from his society, for he had idealized it, and he liked it as long as it was just. As Kelts wrote in his article, “In Morioka, a northern capital city, I attended the neighborhood kindergarten. My memories of those days are uniformly positive. But my mother tells me I was miserable, especially at school.” (P42) After reading the article, we can know that the author prefers Japan to America. Therefore, it can be seen here that the author has idealized his favorite club, but in fact it is not so beautiful. It's a way of paralyzing the ego, and most of the time people don't admit how rare a flaw they like. On the contrary, when a society does not reach people's ideal, they are unwilling to accept the society. Mengestu is one such person. In the article he expresses “I never hosted a Kensington night, however, no doubt in part because I had never been shared with others in a single evening of cheap South Asian food and beer.” (P125) In general, people don't struggle with what to eat and drink at parties. Partying is just a useful way to help the club grow. After all, the author believes that the society does not conform to his ideal, so he is obsessed with some small things. People should not always live according to their ideal way, so that they will miss many wonderful moments in life. And it is not advisable to think of paralysis, slowly people will go to an extreme: not their ideal things all rejected. Not only do people go to extremes, they lose themselves in the pursuit of idealization and become isolated from the outside world.

Second, it is easy for people to lose themselves or isolate themselves from the outside world in the pursuit of idealized communities. It's not easy to find a community that fits your ideal. People may spend a long time looking for it. During this time, people force themselves to search until they find a club that suits them. They ignore other great clubs. People's communication will gradually decrease, and they will become more and more empty. And people will look for any means to cover up their emptiness and pretend that they are living well. But in fact, they are very tired. But at the end of the day, people get lost in the search for idealization. It can be found in Mengestu's article, “There was an obvious and deliberate echo to my walk, a self-conscious reenactment of my father’s routine that I adopted to stave off some of my own emptiness.” (P125) In fact, the author is lonely. He yearns to find a place that truly belongs to him, but he is in the middle of the idealization of himself. It made his life very tired. In other words, he has lost himself. He doesn't know where he belongs. That's why he can't find his place. When people lose themselves, they reduce their communication with the outside world. In most cases, they are reluctant to tell others what their ideal community is like. Because he was afraid that others would not understand and might denigrate the community in him. Kelts implys that “Ascending to 30,000 feet in a plane, watching the New England and New York State landscapes shrink into swatches of green and crooked beige-blue below, I felt both liberated from, and superior to, my classmates, my teammates. for years, I shared my experiences with precisely none of my American friends.” (P44) When people are in a community, they don't communicate less, and they don't feel relieved when they leave. The reason why the author does not share the Japanese community with his friends is that he does not want his friends to think he is a "freak" and does not want them to denigrate it. Therefore, he chose to be silent, until he went to Japan, his heart had a qualitative change. There is no distinction between societies; it all depends on the will of the people. And people should not treat communities differently. It's not fair. Idealization is necessary, but reality is the most important part of people. Grasp the reality and live in the present moment is the best thing people should do.