It Does Happen Here
In the wake of the Littleton and other recent schoolhouse shootings, everyone keeps wondering how this could have occurred in the suburbs. Yet, if you look at schoolhouse massacres, rather than one-on-one shootings, you'll see that almost all of them--Littleton, Paducah, as well as lesser horrors such as Lakewood's Spur Posse depredations--did in fact take place in the suburbs, or at least in bedroom communities structured as suburbs. This is not, in fact, too surprising. In the city, crime is a consequence of poverty; gentrified inner city areas have extremely low crime rates. The suburbs, however, are almost perfectly designed to produce social pathologies.
What do you have in the suburbs? Let's take a quick survey:
1. Each family isolated in its house, an island unto itself behind its crabgrass moat.The consequence of this emotional starvation is stunted souls. If you want to know where family values went in that part of America that doesn't suffer poverty, I say that they died of hunger during the long drive home. No wonder a lot of the kids go nuts.
2. No commons, no public space where neighbors can meet casually on neutral ground.
3. Because of the lack of a commons or integrated commercial districts, suburbanites are utterly dependent on their cars for everything from church to sandwiches; typically one steps from the house to the attached garage, then into the car, and glides away from the neighborhood, encased in a metal cell, to distant facilities where, if you encounter a neighbor, it's an unexpected shock.
4. Long commutes to work for the parents, usually 40 minutes to an hour and a half each way, leaving little time for family or neighborhood life; rockbottom wages for local jobs kids can get, if in fact there are any in the area. In other words, there's nothing to do and no place to do it. You never get close enough to your neighbors to introduce yourselves, since the only common space is the street, which you enter sequestered in your car; many suburbs don't even have sidewalks, presupposing that isolation is the desired value.
The vast and violent flats of South-Central LA, of course, suffer a double whammy: not only is poverty predominant there, but the neighborhoods consist of mile after mile of little clapboard castles, with few stores (or jobs) and little if any common space. These neighborhoods were, after all, the original suburbs of Los Angeles, and represent the future of those pink stucco ghettos whose residents delude themselves that they are hiding from all of life's problems, while their kids sniff glue and build bombs in the garage. Yes, suburbanites, Compton is your future, and not all the fiberglass faux-Spanish roof tiles in the world will ward it off, because the suburban form is inherently anti-family and anti-neighborhood.
Is the lawn, the pool, the big-screen TV, really worth it, after all?
Go to A Word from Eric Miller
