I suppose I have a family as potentially loving or reviled as any other. In actuality though, I’d prefer to embrace a larger swath of the population as family. A few brothers or sisters, and parents struggling to raise children in a world whose propensity to promote struggle, I now understand, do not make for a very wide, robust or diverse personal community.
As a curiosity I wonder if I never began partitioning my family from others competitively, creating dividing lines, because I’d have done anything to join any family but my own. Perhaps happier children from happier families more happily draw distinctions between themselves and others. Or maybe happier folk are happier to simply get along, and so maybe I’ve created divisions too, of my own kind, in seeking happiness outside my own family.
Where ever familial dividing lines really come from, there is no mistaking their outward pattern. Branching from neighborhood to community, to city to state, country and continent. Also no mistake is science fiction in which our entire planet finally unites, but over separation from other planets or cultures. Unity in xenophobia and bigotry, in divisiveness. An astute reading of human nature, an accurate allegory.
So I suppose my larger human family is no better equipped to foster growth or love than my given family. All of us mired in inequity, and destitute individual struggles, blind, or bitter over the collective strength we possess.
I am not very good at this. 