Consider the following comments on community.
Every community draws a circle, and its warmth is measured by who is left standing outside it.
It takes a village to raise a child.
Proverb
We mistake the comfort of sameness for the strength of belonging.
A community survives by the obligations its members never signed but still honour.
The tighter a group binds its own, the harder it becomes for a stranger to enter.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that community is a genuine human good and a quiet engine of exclusion, because the same closeness that sustains its members is built by drawing a boundary against everyone else. Open by honouring what community provides, the web of small obligations and recognitions that no market or government can manufacture. Then press the harder claim: belonging is defined as much by who is kept out as by who is let in, and the warmest communities are often the least porous. A useful third move distinguishes community chosen from community inherited, since a faith group one joins differs from a caste one is born into, yet both can console and confine. Caution: avoid the sentimental view that more community is always better, which forgets that mobs, cliques and exclusionary villages are communities too.