Dracula prince of darkness poster. Flickr/ Tom. Some rights reserved.Who doesn't want a community in which they can be loved and supported? Like many, I was drawn to social justice-oriented spaces because they are serious about providing a space for people excluded by society to feel welcome – and I felt intuitively that was worth supporting.
We seek these kinds of communities because we are constantly, through life, threatened with disposability. If we can’t work, we don’t get food on the table. If we can’t juggle the demands of family, job, and mental health, we collapse. If we do something wrong in the eyes of the law, we are jailed. If we take out too many loans, we are forever in debt. If we don’t go to school and get good grades, we end up on the street.
These threats are dangled over us from birth – we are only valuable if we live up to society’s demands. For many of us, those demands are impossible, even violent. It’s precisely for this reason that we look for spaces that will not discard us when we do something wrong.
