Nathan Harter
September 03, 2008 06:56 pm
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When I started dating the girl who later became my wife, it was necessary on occasion to visit her family’s home, where I witnessed a strange practice. When visitors came over, they were welcome to sit down and chat, but the television was left on to the program they had been watching.
At my house, we turned the television off when anyone stopped by, and we did not have it on whenever people wanted to talk. So I found it distracting to hold a conversation with the ballgame in the same room. My future in-laws thought nothing of it.
We have all had the experience of spending time at somebody else’s home and thinking to ourselves how differently others live. Parents often try to check into the lifestyle of families where their children ask to spend the night, because we know that not everyone lives the way we live.
Being different is not necessarily wrong. Rolling your toilet paper over or under is hardly consequential. But then we do want to say that some practices, some habits, some ways of living are better and some are worse. It is better for example to live in a house where nobody indulges in drunken rages. It just is.
Cities are very much the same way. Many readers have lived elsewhere, so they know what I am talking about. They went away to school or grew up some place else. They might have taken a job for a while in any city, or they traveled extensively. In any case, they know that different cities have different ways of doing things.
In Pittsburgh, the first car wanting to turn left gets to go before the cars start going straight. I was flabbergasted, but they take it in stride. In little Ohio County, every automobile driver waved at every other driver they encountered. All the way to the store, wave, wave, wave. In Anderson, you gesture to another driver, somebody pulls a gun!
In some cities, you stay out of certain neighborhoods if you value your life. In some places, you party till midnight. In some cultures, you step around guys urinating on the wall and pretend not to notice. And many differences are simply differences, neither better nor worse.
Nevertheless (and here I make the key point), some practices are worse. Even the people who live there probably recognize at some level that something is not right. I mean, how can you be completely proud of a slum? Surely you have some suspicion of the crime in your community. Nowhere is perfect.
Once a city recognizes that it has a problem, the leaders can set about finding solutions. The sad thing is when the city does not notice and sees nothing wrong with its pathologies, possibly taking the position that things are just as good there as anywhere else.
So, when a resident raises his or her voice and complains – when somebody claims that the city resists change or discriminates against women or lacks taste or tolerates poor roads or lets dogs run or neglects weeds by the side of the road or supports an unusually high number of meth labs – how do the leaders respond? How does the public respond?
I would contend, for purposes of discussion, that how a city processes these objections signals its vitality. Shut them up, shut them down, turn away, turn against, and the city steers itself into a ditch. It will not do to say, as so many have said in rural Indiana, “Well, that’s just the way we do things around here….”
In Gary, they murder each other. In Darfur, they enslave. In Bangkok, they rape. In Riyaddh, they behead. In Sicily, they curse. In Zimbabwe, they cower. In Harlem, they line up for government checks. Our pathologies are not so dire, but we would be foolish to pretend we have none at all.
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Nathan Harter