In the aftermath of the
Baltimore riots, the New York Times
published a piece by David Brooks called “The Nature of Poverty” in which he noted that the solution to the poverty and
hopelessness that underpinned the riots was not simply in more jobs or more
money. “The real
barriers to mobility,” he wrote, lie in “the quality of relationships in a home
and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility,
future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.” Brooks also
paraphrases Jane Jacobs, noting that “a healthy neighborhood is like a ballet,
a series of intricate interactions in which people are regulating each other
and encouraging certain behaviors.”
“Until
the invisible bonds of relationships are repaired,” Brooks concluded, “life for
too many will be nasty, brutish, solitary and short.”
What
do we do?
Many
decades ago, anthropologists noted that humans tend to gather in
three-generation households and that a primary role for the grandparent is to
pass along the basic ideals and mores of their culture. Grandparents, the thinking goes, are
why we have civilization. That
basic familial structure seems to have eroded across American society, and
especially so in our poor urban neighborhoods. The question must be asked: What can we do to re-energize the three-generation social
unit in these neighborhoods?
Perhaps
a hint can be found in the Occupy movement. In Present Shock Douglas Rushkoff noted that this social movement,
which gained national attention by publicly demonstrating against the economic
excesses of the military-industrial complex, is like “a form of play that . . .
is successful the more people get to play and the longer the game is kept
going.” It also has
elements of the “free university” movement of Boomer days:
“Both online and offline spaces
consist largely of teach-ins about the issues they are concerned with. Young people teach one another or
invite guests to lecture them about subjects such as how the economy works, the
disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services,
possible responses to mass foreclosure, the history of centralized
interest-bearing currency, and even best practices for civil disobedience.” (p.
.58)
Imagine
a similar not as a short-term protest, but as an ongoing cross-generational
engagement within neighborhoods. The
goal would be to use current issues to stimulate inter-generational
conversations about a wide range of topics, from the kinds of personal skills
usually passed down by parents and grandparents to understanding the impact of
broad social issues on the local neighborhood. The purpose would be to rebuild a sustainable cross-generation
conversation that is essential to guiding young people into a vital community
life. An approach like this would need a home base and governance structure
that would help ensure its long-term stability in the neighborhood, one that
guaranteed that everyone’s issues get discussed, but that also pushes to
consensus and, where needed, action.
Such
an approach would not replace the family structure, but should be designed to
complement it, guaranteeing that young people have access to conversation with
neighbors of other generations who can form a kind of extended family within
the neighborhood.
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