Wednesday, August 22, 2001
|
Wednesday, August 22, 2001 |
|
Where has Community gone? By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
As if we can't find enough to argue about, Dave and I occasionally debate the causes of the Decline of Community. The part we agree on is that the bonds between neighbors have eroded in our lifetime. It is now newsworthy when people take over lawn-mowing and home maintenance for a neighbor recovering from devastating injuries. In previous generations, such care would have been assumed. We grew up in middle-class neighborhoods of front porches, sidewalks, parks, vacant lots where kids could make up softball teams or play hide-and-go-seek (only we called it "hidey-go") in the twilight. Where people knew each other, and whose kids were whose. Where post office and library, school and church, were within walking distance, and where you knew your kids would be followed, not by predators, but by the eyes of neighbors who cared. So what has happened to Community? Urban sprawl and America's love affair with the car, say I. Americans park their cars within the four walls of their homes or under roofs mere steps from their doors. They get in, push buttons to open garage doors and lock car doors, turn on the radio to deaden their senses to anyone or anything around them, and travel in their own little bubbles to their work places. There, they reverse the steps: They pull into the company parking decks and ride in elevators to their offices, where they may greet other humans for the first time today. "Good morning, Ralph. Nice day, huh?" How would they know? They have not experienced weather except visually, so that is not really a shared moment, nor have they spoken to a neighbor or a fellow commuter, except perhaps by gesture. All right, I'm painting an extreme picture to make a point, but odds are Americans interact less with neighbors who eat and sleep a few yards away than with those they encounter at the work place. We travel the same way, and if you doubt it, follow a car full of our overweight, under-exercised compatriots along a road like the breathtakingly beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway. Windows up, A.C. on, stereo blaring, they peer through glass at a vista of impossible greens, an ever-changing skyscape crisscrossed by birds caroling for the sheer joy of living and never really see or hear or feel anything. At each overlook, they pull over, evacuate the car, snap off a few frames at least when they get home, they'll see where they've been and then it's back in their steel cocoon to the next stop. The first such overlook might take a minute, and involves the entire carload. By the third or fourth, the driver no longer bothers to get out, and after that, there seems to be a designated photographer, thus cutting the pit stop to a neat 15 seconds or so. Other sightseers are ignored by those insulated in their car. I say cars caused the degradation of community. Dave disagrees. It was air conditioning that "ruined the South," as he loves to put it. The South is growing faster than any other region of the country except, perhaps, California, and it sure wouldn't have happened without air conditioning. Take central Florida, he says, and I bite my tongue not to add, "Please." "When I was a kid growing up, there was nothing there but scrub palmetto and mosquitoes. Nobody in their right mind would go there. Then along comes air conditioning and look at it now: Disney World. "Air conditioning opened up the South to Yankees. And everybody stays in the house." He's right. Life in the South would be unthinkable without "air" in our homes, cars, businesses, schools. Before A.C., people really did sit on porches in hopes of an evening breeze, and so did their neighbors, and sooner or later, conversations were struck up, acquaintances ripened into friendships, caring began. Kids found playing outdoors preferable to sweltering indoors. Besides, what was there to do indoors? Watch TV? Play computer games? Which leads to other possibilities in this blame game. Television is often cited as a destroyer of community, because it allows us to be entertained without venturing out of our homes or God forbid! sitting in a room full of strangers to watch a play. True. But I'd argue that television builds community on a national scale. How else would people from coast to coast know to care for a small shark-bitten boy in Florida, or to respond to the needs of flood victims in the Midwest? What else would enable us to choke up with pride as we watch the triumph of a Lance Armstrong or a women's soccer team? It goes beyond our shores. Just ask the new parents of children adopted from one of the eastern European nations ravaged by conflict. Chances are they learned of these kids' fate by television. Urban sprawl. Cars. Air conditioning. There are more candidates for this discussion, but I'd be interested in your take. Has Community declined? Or has it merely morphed into something different?
|
