Warning: This is going to be one of those “When I was young…” posts, so youngsters beware.
When I was young it seemed that I spent quite a bit of time playing with most of the kids in my neighborhood. I would eat dinner at thier houses sometimes, and so on. If I did something stupid while at one of thier houses, thier parents would discipline me right then and there, no questions asked. If my family needed help in some way, our neighbors were always there to help out. It was really cool living in a community like this, in my opinion.
I am sure there are still some places like this, but it seems that the great majority of kids today don’t grow up in close knit communities anymore. What has caused the erosion of people being friendly with their neighbors? Is everyone scared to let their kids play in the 'hood? Are we all just overly self-focused? And what the hell happened to “Kick the can”?
I’m 21, and I had a bit of that. The kids whose backyards were adjacent to mine played together a lot, and we played with kids across the street, too. We liked to ride bikes, so we would usually end up running into other kids from the neighborhood, and hung out with them. And this was in San Francisco proper, no less.
Hang out in the Pit for a week and I think it becomes sadly obvious* why communities are no longer close. You get sued/attacked/run over/poisoned/ whatever for the tiniest infractions, and society can no longer trust itself.
*-I’m referring more to the subject of the OPs, not the Pitizens themselves.
First of all, if you are in your 20s, you probably don’t live in a “community”. You likely live in an appartment complex or a neighborhood with other transient types. You probably don’t have a house or children so your sense of community is the laudrymat and the bars where you and your friends from school or work hang out.
There are, however, some legitimate reasons why the old-style community is disappearing:
-Urban design - Suburban communities are designed around the car. Large isolated subdivisions, highways and strip malls all do two things - they tend to issolate people from each other and they make it more dangerous for kids to get from one place to another.
People work too much - You don’t have the old housewives gabbing around the neighborhood anymore while the men are off working.
TV/Internet/videogames - In the old days, we used to bike or skateboard around the neighborhood or play ball or whathaveyou. Now everyone just sits around staring at a screen getting fat and stupid.
Basically, the model for today is one or two adults who work full time+ while the kids go off to school. They come home to a big empty McMansion that’s isolated from 1000 other identical houses by 4 lane highways and distance. Most of the time, the kids have no supervision other than electronic toys that feeds into their every whim and fantasy. When they do play outside, often it takes the form of highly organized, highly competive sports where their drunken parents can yell at each other in a pathetic attempt to relive their high school glory.