No matter where you live, odds are good it's in a neighborhood. I've lived in the country, an apartment, a castle dungeon, and smack-dab in the center of suburbia. All places I've lived came with "neighbors" - even though in some cases, the neighbors were "a quick bike ride" away rather than "a stone's throw".
The neighborhood I'm in now is solidly suburban...with the accouterments one expects from suburbia. We have sidewalks, trash trucks, and kids on the corner after school. The neighborhood where I live is not the kind of neighborhood you'd see featured on the cover of "Better Homes and Gardens". It's not a gated neighborhood and one look at the sky-blue and orange house down the street proves...ours is not a neighborhood with tightly constricted house paint colors in our covenants. It's an old neighborhood, too. No underground utilities or two car driveways.
Enough about what our neighborhood is not. Here's what it is...
It's a neighborhood with short fences and small yards. Across those short fences, we swap summer squash and winter soup recipes. When our neighbor's dogs bark, we all know it, and when a neighbor's baby is born, we know that too. Our neighbors speak in many languages, some I understand well, a few I can't understand at all. We have alleys. And lots of squirrels. We even have a ballpark and all summer long, talented people sing The National Anthem over the loudspeaker, and that's our neighborhood cue - cheering, singing, and the aroma of greasy hot dogs will soon follow. Instead of homeowner's association meetings, we have an annual breakfast at the park. There's an old guy who limps across his lawn on one foot - because that's all he has - scooping dog poop and greeting all passersby. This guy rides his bicycle year round, with a trailer attached. Using that trailer, he collects aluminum cans that the neighbors leave in sacks for him to pick up. When the streets are icy and he has trouble getting his bike up the hills, one of us helps him. There's also a lady who pushes a red wagon and sells homemade tamales from it. Pork, spicy pork, chicken, and jalapeno. We buy some every time she comes around.
Our neighborhood is a hodgepodge of shapes, colors, sizes, smells, and sounds. Many of those aspect are in-congruent with one another - such as when the firemen practice their bagpipes at the same time a train trundles by, or the place three streets south with weeds up to my shoulders...sitting next to the one bursting with hollyhocks, pansies, and sunflowers. And here's the thing about that - it's in those incongruities where the magic resides. When you can almost get run over by a kid on a skateboard one minute, and then watch that same kid help a blind man cross the street ten minutes later...magic is the only explanation.
My dream is to someday see our neighborhood's unabashed blend of individuality and community catch on across the globe...not because our neighborhood is perfect, but because it is caring.
The title of this post is, "Do you want a better neighborhood?" If so, then the answer is, "Be a better neighbor." Let's expand that. Do you want a happier world? Then be a happy contributor to it.
Thanks.
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As a white woman living in a predominately white state (though I also happen to live in perhaps the most racially-diverse city in this state), I've been able to hold onto this wonderful fantasy that racism in the US was not a HUGE problem anymore. (That is white privilege speaking...and yes, if you're white, you do have it.) I wasn't stupid, I knew racial-dislike existed, I simply didn't think it existed in most American minds or homes.
Obama was elected president and my happy-clappy little fantasy was busted almost overnight. At first, I refused to believe it. I SERIOUSLY thought people were talking crap about Obama's birth certificate because they really, truly just wanted to be jerks. My husband and a black friend opened my eyes. Now I see the racism in so many moments, it's depressing as hell.
I hear this a lot - "I'm not a racist, but President Obama..." If you're not a racist, why can't you just skip the damned intro and go right into, "Obama..."?
My white privilege kept me largely cushioned from the undercurrent of racism that thunders through our country. I think one of the best ways to deal with it is to admit it. White privilege means little things like - Geraldo wouldn't blame our clothing style on whether we got shot by a guy who says things like, "they always get away". White privilege lets us think, "Racism isn't a big problem anymore, the Civil Rights movement did away with that." White privilege is a cushy way of saying, "I don't see it and therefore it doesn't exist." Well, there is a black kid who is dead now because racism still does exist (and he is one of hundreds).