Quote:
Originally Posted by jtown,man
I don't necessarily disagree with you.
I've traveled all over, lived all over, and I had bigger expectations for the city. Basic expectations to be honest. A clean city, safe, and a population that was civil.
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I hear you, but I think you're just noticing bad stuff and not internalizing good things. I like Tokyo a lot and everyone there does follow the rules. I feel reflected shame for myself when a tourist is being loud on the same train car I'm on in Tokyo! But I also like Mexico City and Bangkok a lot and those places are nuts.
People in my neighborhood sometimes drink in their cars and throw the bottles on to the sidewalk. I pick them up. Sometimes people do come in from the suburbs and exurbs with the goal of annoying city dwellers with loud motorcycle groups. I largely overlook that stuff because it doesn't affect my day-to-day life in any way.
What *does* affect my ordinary day is seeing kids exit the school on my block and run to the corner store to buy candy. I often don't lock the door to my house if I run out on an errand. Several times a summer as I'm walking to get a coffee on Saturday morning I see a big wedding happening in the church on the way. When I walk my dog in the late afternoon I say "hi" to the same mailman I see a few times a week. I walk to get my haircut. I'm basically living the small town life in Chicago that my rural relatives think that they are living. In reality,
their lives are driving 15 minutes each way to Walmart several times a week.
The small town of 2000 I grew up in was about a 30-minute drive from the closest fast food. It's the kind of place people have second homes. When I was in highschool there were two murders, one was the father of a classmate. I can't tell you what sort of carnage was wreaked by drunk driving and drunk snowmobiling. A constant drumbeat. If you got out of your car on the way to someplace, there were bullet holes in all kinds of stuff, and rain-soacked — mags and beercans on the sides of the highway. But no one thought of any of those things as being social issues because they were spread out in a low density environment. The distance I would drive to meet a "neighbor" as a highschooler is about the same as between the Loop and Lakeview. If all of the misery in that distance in a fairly idyllic rural area was packed into one community it would be noticed, but since it's just driven quickly past and seen through a car window, no one ever thinks about it.
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