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MikeAgger has correctly (IMHO) identified suburbanites as (to some
degree) parasites: leeching on the amenities of the city without
contributing much of their own. Try putting a suburb like Stow, Ohio in
the middle of a cornfield (if you can find an intact space big enough) and
see how many people live there without a city to sustain it.
Another problem I have with cities stems from grok's defense of their
separation: "Maybe because we sacrificed, saved, borrowed, worked
many jobs at once, etc., so we wouldn't have to deal with that 'both good
and bad.'" What determines who lives in a suburb and who doesn't?
Economic status. Suburbs aren't egalitarian, they're a method of keeping
out the "undesirables"; they don't get rid of the "bad", they just keep it away.
Look back to the first suburbs; Llewellyn Park,
NY and Riverside, IL were exclusionary, upper-crust-only places that
gave industrialists the opportunity to escape the city that they were
creating. Today, post-Levittown, we still have the exclusion but we don't
have the aesthetic amenities that Riverside had (sorry, curvy roads don't
cut it) You may want to escape the problems, but they're still there,
festering. The solution isn't to wall off your community (read Neal
Stephenson's "Snow Crash" for a portrait of a walled-America and tell me
if you'd like to live there), but to engage the problems head on and try and
ameliorate them.
The irony is, the very web site that this debate is raging on [and the
one it's cross-posted on] is a conspirator in that very isolation!
Before things like this, if you wanted
interaction, you had to leave your house, find someone, LOOK AT
THEM and converse. Don't like the way they look? Fine; don't talk to
them (remember, conversations without eye-contact are remarkably
short), but eventually you'll be left with no one to talk to. Now that we
have the WWW and Internet, we can complete the isolation process.
Wake up, eat, walk into the computer room, cyber-commute, do your
work, surf the 'net over to the grocery store's web page, order your food,
it gets delivered (if you're lucky by a real person), check email, join a chat
room and "talk" with people on who knows what, eat dinner, go to sleep.
What do we even need front doors for??? Want to date someone? Go to
Match.com. Have another need? It's on the web somewhere, just ask
Yahoo or Lycos. When does the human interaction come? Thank God sex
isn't virtually reproducible, or else we could just eliminate all visual
contact altogether (oh wait; I forgot about artificial insemination). You'd
still have all the "amenities" that city life, but you'd spend 90% of your
waking life staring at a screen with images on it. And don't try and tell me
that I'm blowing things out of proportion, I'm just continuing the trends
we see right now in society. Is it any wonder why our suburbs look like
hell? We've isolated ourselves from so much of society that we can only
reproduce what we've seen, and we haven't seen much.
So give me the crime, the crowds, the ability to walk down a city street
and recognize no-one. It keeps me aware of how different humanity is; I
can't avoid the problems here, I have to face them. Leaving the city to
raise your children because "it's safer" is trying to separate them from the
inevitable; sooner or later they will come face to face with reality with
only the tools and experiences that they've been provided. Why deny
them the very things they need to survive?
I close with two quotations:
Wesley [Princess Bride] "Life is pain; anyone who says differently is selling something."
Thomas Jefferson "Those who would trade freedom [including the
'freedom' to experience trouble] for safety deserve neither."
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