Neighborhoods

It's over! I now declare the old style neighborhood to be dead on arrival. When I was a child everyone in our neighborhood knew everyone else. We related to each other daily, visited each other in our homes or on the front porch or backyard. We were a neighborhood, a community. Kids in the neighborhood didn't even have to knock before entering a neighborhood home. Doors weren't locked and everyone in the neighborhood was welcome. That neighborhood made us all much happier and safer. Friendly neighborhoods do produce better schools, better local government, much lower crime, better care for the aged and disabled, and less movement in and out of neighborhoods.

People often stayed in their neighborhood homes much longer in that age. They saw less reason to move because their neighborhoods were more satisfying. They were more often satisfying places for them to live. Now, we move constantly. One reason is to escape today is that we see our neighborhood as un satisfying or in decay. People don't care as much about the neighborhood when they move into it today,  because they are so disconnected from people and connected to electronic communications instead. For them, the neighborhood is the Internet. How sad.

I remember the many neighborhood groups of my youth. The Neighborhood Watch was one. It didn't just keep an eye on potential crime, it took care of a neighbor's property when he or she was out of often on vacation. We didn't worry about our homes being broken into by thieves because we knew the neighbors were taking acre of our homes while we were away. Now we think crime or property damage to our homes can or even will happen, and we worry about it much of the time we are away from our homes.

The concept of "social connectedness" is enhanced by the neighborhood community. It's destroyed by substituting our real neighborhoods with an internet neighborhood. We used to have community newspapers when I was a child which told us news about our neighborhood.  Those papers gave us a spirit of connectedness. Now we have on line national newspapers that give us vacuous information that if not wholly untrue is completely irrelevant to our lives. The neighborhood church, once a center of the community, has been closed  today and replaced with a car wash or fast food restaurant.  But I think we need a cleaner soul and nutrition more than we need burgers and a wax job.

I do not even know the names of my neighbors now. They are rarely seen outside, and when they go out it is to drive somewhere in their car. Some do not even wave to their neighbors when they see them. They don't wash their cars or mow the lawn outside anymore. It's also rare for neighbors to sit on their front porch, so there is little chance for even the polite wave of acknowledgment from and to them when we see each other. What a shame! I find the community sprit of the old style neighborhood far more comforting and fulfilling than all those Internet web site "communities".