Just when
the shock of the Boston Marathon attack was beginning to settle a bit (I was less
than two blocks from the infamous boat on the Thursday afternoon), the horror
story out of Cleveland again shatters our sense of safety and human
decency. Everyone will make their own
moral story out of each event, and I’ve been thinking about mine.
Of the facts
that have come out so far, the description of the homeowner’s way of living
struck me most. He was a man who,
according to neighbors, never used his front door, but drove into his back
yard, locked the gate, and entered from the rear. People said he was friendly when outside, but
that he never had company and never visited anyone else.
What
occurred to me was my own childhood in a lower-middle to middle class
neighborhood in Queens in the 1950s and 1960s.
There were about ten houses on each side of our street, and I can still
recall at least eight of the families on my side, and about half those on the
other (there was more movement on the other side, so a few families changed
over in my six years before college).
Every family interacted with every other over the backyard fences, on
the front lawns, and in each other’s houses.
A few families didn’t have kids, but they were as connected to the rest
of the block as all those with school-age children.
Before that
I lived in a far more urban part of Brooklyn, where three-story and somewhat
taller apartments were the norm. Every
day from first through sixth grade I walked 8 blocks to school, often four
times a day, since we could go home from lunch.
I was at the outer edge of the school catchment area, and I often heard
from my mother that another mom had seen me doing something like wandering up
one of the streets between school and home at the end of the day. My wife lived in suburb of Providence, and
recalls how the five-year-olds and up would walk to school, picking up members
of their little crew on the way.
Today we
live on a block with 16 houses. We have
exactly one friend on the block (two others moved away), and perhaps two others
with whom we have a cordial acquaintance.
The rest are total strangers to us, and I think, to each other.
Beyond
anecdotes, numerous studies report that parents are far more fearful for their
children’s safety than at any time in the past.
The distance even older children are allowed to travel unsupervised has
shrunk from miles to backyards. Yet
there is no evidence that events like that in Cleveland are any more common
than in the past.
The
problem, it seems to me, is twofold.
First, we know about every incident immediately, no matter where it
happens. That means we have a collection
of frightening events that covers at least all 300+ million Americans, plus
occasional major abominations abroad.
But one evolutionary biologist has suggested that we take in these
events as if they had occurred in the small, local social unit that was what
our ancestors knew: a hundred people or somewhat more. So our calculation of odds is inevitably
warped. (I know one person who is fanatical about locking the back door to her
well-fenced yard in a very safe neighborhood.
Why: because she can list three home invasions leading to murder that
appeared on the local news: one in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut, and one
in New Hampshire over a period of six years.)
But the
paradox is that the more we shut down in order to feel safe, the less safe we
are. On my current block there are no
block parties, the yards are larger and farther apart, and most people spend
their time indoors. Everyone has a
garage, so no one comes home, parks on the street, and chats with another
neighbor arriving at the same time. In
fact, 15 of the 16 homes on my street have attached garages, so hidden movement
between car and house would be even easier than in Cleveland (the 16th
had a garage but converted in into added living space).
So we
follow the reverse strategy of what many living creatures have developed to
protect themselves against predators.
Instead of flocking together, watching out for the whole herd, or
circling around the young, we do exactly what predators hope for: we carve
ourselves out from the herd and so have no one but ourselves around when the
predator comes stalking. And we put our
faith in security cameras, while complaining that these are an invasion of
privacy when put up by government to protect us, but not when installed by
businesses to protect themselves. (And
even though they helped capture the perpetrators in Boston, they aren’t very
good at the “See Something, Say Something” model, except in tightly monitored
circumstances.) No wonder a frightening number of us want assault rifles by our
bedsides.
