Vanishing neighborliness in suburbia

Bud Cooper
   Neighborhoods have changed dramatically since the fifties and sixties when everyone knew the faces and names of the majority of people on their street. The transformation of neighborliness and people get g to know those who live closest has been a destructive element in modern America as now days most people know nor care about who lives nearby. Instead of conforming Americans today are far more concerned about express their individualism and this lays out culturally as many stay away from those they deem different. Marc Dunkleman has written a book called "The Vanishing Neighbor" that dwells into how America has changed and how we interact with out local community. He says people are less cognizant of others especially those from different economic or social settings as ourselves.in one example the author mentions how the central business district brought everyone down to one centralized place to shop and run into all different types of people but malls have displaced this opportunity of learning and meeting diverse peoples. Today's malls and dollar stores separate the lives of people based o. Economic conditions and the high end malls and expensive prices are one reason inequality increased unabated. Rich people are not about to take sacrifices and downsize their lifestyles and their control and a itty to manipulate the economy is a reason why there is ever increasing inequality in the Western world. It is easy for  the wealthy to make a nightmare for heir fellow citizens when they can avoid ever having to come across and seeing the wave of social destruction their actions cause. The ties and jobs that bind communities are easily thwarted by individuals with no connections to the communities and hold power and decisions that send jobs overseas to the benefit of the corporations. These are the same folks that can force the few people lucky to have jobs to work long hours and have no time for civic action and community involvement. As  Dunkleman points out being neighborly today in suburbia means leaving the other person alone and not bothering to reach out and get to know them. The term neighborly has changed and evolved over the years and surely television has much t do with this. Unfortunately in this book he doesn't say much if this crucial cultural habit that coincided with the decline f the traditional American neighborhood as people fled to cheap constructed suburban housing in the suburbs to have more space from apparently real people.their appearing wealth masked in Ina transparency of accounting that rewards racial and economic segregation in over valued assets of housing.   The apparent divisions and lack of ability to compromise has reached top levels of our governing body and this can be a result of the transformation of our living environment and castle-like modern mentality. Only an age of extreme abundance provided these living arrangements and Americans were only able to enjoy this momentary transition because the rest of the industrial world sat on debris following two World Wars. Marc ones through several topics and his feeling of governmental bureaucracies being responsible  for demise of the community is way off base as he felt community responsibilities for old age and welfare was a better alternative. If this was the case there would not have been a huge demand for reform and a social security pact that Franklin Roosevelt's new deal pushed through. The private sector did not have the capacity to take care of all during the great depression. He concludes American exceptional ism is at risk with our inability to solve crisis in the community level and eventually there will be a day of reckoning we will all face for transitioning ourselves in this private living arrangements where we didn't take more investment in  our  fellow citizens, allowed unassimilable immigrants and foreigners take over much, and cared only  for stuff that was advertised on the television invention that has dismantled all that helped make this once a great growing nation. Marc also fails to mention the industrial military complex in uprooting thousands of young people from their communities and placing them half across the world to fight and serve for wealth international oil oligarchs. This has done more than anything else in destroying communities as young people are taken from their communities in their prime years. This oak misses much in the authors attempts to explain why we are not like his grandfathers generations anymore.

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