If you know Drupal well enough to find yourself reading this, you probably know that Drupal is powered by a global community. In practice, though, it is very easy to look at your local community, your co-workers, and the people you meet at DrupalCons and think, “This is the Drupal community.”
The reality is that we each know and understand a limited slice of the community; the experiences and perspectives are different from locale to locale, sector to sector, function to function, and of course individual to individual.