Burlington High School
Burlington, Kansas
Teacher: Mrs. Devra Parker
Community and What It Means to Me
By Levi Skillman
12th grade
Community has many meanings to me. This is the basic thing that makes up our country. Strong communities are needed for the United States to be a strong country. Community is made [up] of many things.
Family is the first thing that makes up a community. Strong families are like the building blocks of a community. Members of a family have to do their part.
Parents are the back bone of every family. They need to be available to their children. and they need to teach them how to be a good person. It takes a lot of patience and time to be a good parent. Too many people today are not committing themselves to their children. This is weakening the family structure and this will hurt our communities. Parents need to be around to teach their children the things they need to know to become good adults. Learning right and wrong all comes from a family.
Children in a family need to be responsible to their family. They learn to do chores and duties that help each other out. This is how we all learn to help each other and how to make our communities be good places to live. Children learn what it means to give some things up so that others around them can be happy.
Extended families are next in all of this. Everyone needs to help people they are related to when they need help. This keeps a community from having to support people. This means that their money can be used to help with other projects and things that the community needs to do. For example, when a grandparent needs help, if the other family members would pitch in and help there would not be so much expense to our country. It is not just the older ones that need help though. Sometimes young parents need help and advice with the new responsibilities of a family. Often the Grandparents can help with this. We all just need to help each other whenever we can.
Neighborhoods are the next things that are very important in every community. Sometimes family members are not around because they move to other communities for jobs. We often see things that our neighbors need help with. Maybe they do not have families close by to help them. If they do not have relatives around we need to really step in and help them. Sometimes they might be sick and they could use a meal, or maybe their yard needs to be mowed. It just does not take that much time to go help them out and it could make a big difference in their life. Again, our government would not have to step in a help them out. Besides our government cannot see the things they need, they can just give them money or some community services.
One example of how our community spends too much is the busing service that takes people to doctors or to shopping places like the grocery store. Buying vehicles, paying for gas wages for someone to drive has to cost a lot. If neighbors were helping each other we would not need this service. It would not cost anything to take a neighbor to the store when you are going anyway. There are many other examples how individuals helping out the community would save taxes.
Towns are made of neighborhoods. If the neighborhoods are strong and helpful the town will be safe and a good place to settle down. Some of the things a community needs would be taken care of by the helpful neighborhoods. Things like taking care of parks, volunteering for many things at hospitals, schools and churches would cut down on tax spending. The collected taxes could be used for better roads, hospitals and schools. Everything in the community would improve [over] time.
If all of our towns and cities were like this there would be fewer problems for our country. One of the big things we could cut down on would be welfare. When neighborhoods are involved in helping each other…a capable person would be more likely to go to work. They would face the people that were helping them so they would get more motivated to try to take care of themselves. Taking help from a working neighbor would not be as easy as going to the mailbox to get a check. This would make our nation more productive; crime would also go way down. We would not need so many cops. People would do something about the illegal problems that are in their own neighborhood. Today everyone is too busy to help each other out. We need to end this cycle. Families need to slow down and find more time for each other. When this happens then we will begin to notice our extended family and our neighbors needs more too. All of this will help make our country better.