The vision of a community

I am not 100% sure where to start this or where I want it to go and in my defense I have only been awake for about an hour and I am only on my 2nd cup of coffee so I may ramble at times but I will do my best to get my point across the best way I know how.

This post was originally meant for my blog but I think I am going to post it on the main DRN page so everyone can read it without having an account.

Something was said to me this morning by another member of the herp community that really got me thinking and that was “we all need to band together” Being a private conversation I don’t want to share everything that led up to that statement but that one statement turned out being more powerful than I thought.

You see I have called this a community for a long time, thanks to John F Taylor of course. I use to refer to it as an industry which I guess we are in part but all together we are a community. The problem is the more and more I dig into things the more and more I start to see that we are not a community at all. I always hear things such as “We are a community and we need to start acting like it” The problem is a lot of this comes from people who no less than a wee prior had a big fat goose egg as far as community involvement goes but now wants to get up in arms about all the things they ignored prior. Then they end up getting mad when people don’t want to jump on bored.

I myself am guilty of this as well. Sometimes I hear from someone who has never ever one time even watched my show let alone helped support it who wants a favor and I think to myself “Why would I do that? You have never scratched my back” Well that my friends in NOT a community. It’s like we are all in this only for #1 and could care less about anyone ells. We all seem to forget what got us into this community in the first place, We all forget how stupid we were when we got our first reptile and we all forget that one or many people who took the time out of their day and helped us get started and never asked anything in return.

Personally I think it’s time that things changed my friends, I am reminded of a movie quote that really fits in here

“We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist.”

We need to all take a step back, every single one of us and take good measure of what is going on, wake up and look around us and notice that our love is being ripped out from under us, no that’s the wrong way of saying it. We are giving it away,

We need to take a stand and say we are not going to deal with this anymore and I am not talking about laws and or banns, we need to stand up and say we are not going to put up with the way things are going, We need to fix ALL the problems within before we can ever have a hope for fixing the problems we have already created. As noted earlier in this blog post. This is a community damn it and we need to start acting like one.