The Cornerstone of Community: Respecting Elders

[The Madame X]

[Hesperus]

This is very true and so important. Without the transmission of wisdom from Elders to future generations, there is no culture, and the core of the community, all the lessons learned and experiences shared that gave birth to it, is at risk of being lost.

Elders aren't guaranteed to be easy people to get along with--survivors often aren't--but they have something priceless to offer and, often at great personal sacrifice, they have stuck around and continue offering it. Spend 15 minutes in a vampire community Facebook group and, after taking a moment to recover, imagine willingly engaging with that for *decades*. If you can't find some kind of respect for anybody who goes through that and manages to somehow be even occassionally constructive, then you're just not community material.

Questioning convention and challenging previous ways of thinking lie at the heart of this community so differences of opinion are inevitable and, I would argue, an essential and positive part of a healthy community. What makes this diversity of opinion and expression so valuable is the opportunity it represents for growth. That, however, requires that one be open to receiving the wisdom that's being offered. Anyone entering a space open to as many differing beliefs and backgrounds as ours already convinced of their own ideas' superiority will always be dissatisfied here. What made this a community rather than a waystation along the path to more traditional associations was the realization that there is an incomparable benefit to all Nightkind sharing their wisdom with each other.

And that's the magic of respect. Respect transformed a bunch of random passionate misfits into a community, into opportunities to explore and express ourselves freely-- for many of us, for the first time in our lives--about topics that often made even other weirdos squeamish. If you don't have that, if you don't *need* that, then this probably just isn't the place for you.