What Is A Community?

To the Editor:

I am currently a senior at Newtown High School, and I was assigned a project to take action within the community and define what a community is. In my project I surveyed students and asked them how they like to help out their community, and how they themselves would define a community. In my research I was able to come up with this working definition of community and saw this letter to the editor as a perfect way to conclude my project.

 As Shakespeare once wrote, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

This concept can be applied to the word community. Community, is one of many English words that are impossible to define without personal opinion being mixed into the definition. Starting off very simply a community could be one person we each individually represent as a community of one. Taking it a step further a community could be described as a location such as Newtown, Conn., or Connecticut itself could be described as a community among states. In essence our solar system is a community perhaps even our galaxy, the ideas that expand from a nine-letter word I found were limitless. Community is more than the blood in your veins, it is past the Newtown flagpole, it is even bigger than nations combined, community is all of humanity and without it nothing could exist.

The balance that occurs within our environment, our nations and our own lives is what makes every thing that occurs from day to day possible. Community is what holds this balance together and without it not even a single rose could grow.

Francesca Piscitelli

Senior at Newtown High School

5 Butternut Ridge, Newtown                                 January 26, 2005