Imagine needing a study to find that an active, trusting community has less “crime”.
I see people “walking” their dogs by fucking driving their car with a leash out the window all the fucking time here. My neighbourhood is just weird though.
This is in Canada, my neighbours are just freaks. Imagine a small, rural town filled with nothing but crunchy environmentalists under 35, and 10,000 carbon copies of Red Green
Was just talking with my bf the other day about how few people go on walks in our neighborhood. Like I think it’s a nice neighborhood, and relatively walkable! (For the USA).
We have to take the dogs out regularly but we don’t ever see anyone else from our block ever walking around.
It’s wild to think how lovely the neighborhood would be if even 50% of us walked around regularly.
my street had a block party for the 4th. my partner baked cookies, which i brought over to the 20-30 people a few houses up. nobody looked at me, i had to interrupt a conversation to ask where to put the cookies, and once i put them down, nobody continued to acknowledge me until i felt too awkward standing alone so i left. i’m not gonna stop anyone breaking into your houses now and i want my tupperware back.
American culture creates the awkward personal encounter.
Most people spend their days playing the role at work of agreeable, compliant and guffawing stiffs, then spend their free time watching tv and buying cheap disposable crap (without stopping to pause to consider most of it’s been made by child slave labor in SE Asia) to fill up their attics and garages to fill the void in their empty lives with consumerism.
It’s almost as if the whole modern world has been constructed this way so that in our alienation we never seek to find or express commonality with our neighbors, so that no class bonds or solidarity has a chance to develop. Instead, we have Keeping Up with the Joneses status-seeking and envy of what others have.
It’s a weird, pitiful culture here. We’ve made a whole society of stunted adolescents who haven’t learned how to express themselves or trust in humanity, where instead of acknowledging universal truths we speak in the language and touchstones of media sensationalism, sports and advertisements.
this has been known since like, the 30’s.
active community that knows each other = high rates of informal surveillance = reduced crime; this is basic social disorganization theory. atomization makes this pretty hard to achieve unless you’re in a wealthy area, unfortunately.
