Suburban Suffocation
Late spring has come, and with it, a group of softball players who drive over the local park close to where I live. This isn’t anything new, as this has been going on for the better part of a decade or more. I have lived in one area long enough to watch, once choked with of weeds and almost unusable for most forms of recreation, to be cleaned up and have a baseball ring, soccer posts, and a playground. The surrounding area has also sprawled from what was once on the periphery of the town and where farmhouses were quite common. Now, nearly all of that land has been bought, redeveloped and repurposed for suburban expansion. It is an entirely different community from what it once was not so long ago, before I lived there and more residences in the area were constructed.
I see these groups of people who come to play softball in the park as nothing more than vultures. On its face this likely comes off as a harsh and tribalistic assessment. They just want to play baseball in the public park, don’t they? However, what they do is lack any sort of contribution to the community they are physically present in, but otherwise do not participate in.
I have said before that it is often difficult to establish a sense of community in suburban areas, especially over time, and the one that exists tends to be rather tenuous. However, there generally exists some level of community in most suburbs, even if it’s mostly confined to talking to immediate neighbours and those across the street. If others come in and they find their own area less accessible, it will be a form of suffocation.
In a normal, healthy community, strangers which are not part of it arriving to use the area for their own recreation – beyond the involvement of, say, just passing through or taking a walk – should have some sort of toll associated with it, rather than it be used freely. This may sound like a question of privatization or not, but this goes further beyond that, as I will explain in a couple of paragraphs. Whether it be some sort of donation or other favour given to the local community, outsiders should not be able to do as they please with communities that they are not part of. Otherwise, a community that tolerates such behaviour either already has or will soon cease to have a strong sense of collective identity, meaning it will cease function as a community in all but physical proximity. Therefore, outsiders who do not pay some sort of price or have anything that they wish to do with the locals, should be made to feel unwelcome and discouraged from coming there, due to effectively taking away space and resources in some instances from the local community.
What’s the big deal, some might say? They are just using the park for a few hours every once in a while. It’s not like they are trashing everything. And it is true that their behaviour could be worse. In some places, it is, where they behave more like a swarm of locusts, rather than vultures who tend to not leave much behind. On some level, it is the fault of the local community for not organizing events in the park more often – I think there is a local soccer club for kids where most participants do not have drive too far or can walk. But then it turns into a feedback loop, of where if outsiders freely use local land, the locals may become more discouraged from using it at will, leading to increasing lack of usage by the community, and I have indeed anecdotally noticed this subtle pattern over time.
I’m not a very strict adherent in delineating between public and private land usage, and the legalesque associations and connotations that come with it. Among liberals and socialists, privatizing land is often seen as some sort of Pandora’s box of exploitation, and among more right-wing or libertarian beliefs, making private land public may be seen as overreach. How and by whom land is defacto utilized and respected is much more important to me than if it is designated as public and private and who may or may not have ownership of it, and I think more people need to entertain this idea.
Dealing with people playing sports in an area, most of them being racially homogenous as well, would probably require a few civilized talks to try to get them to contribute to the community that they otherwise have no participation in, or stop coming. I think this would be the most reasonable approach instead of, say, slashing their tires or breaking their headlights, which would be a rather disproportionate response, even if they shouldn’t just stroll in like they own the place. However, hypothetically, such actions and the like might be the only way to get certain groups of people who actively make an area worse – i.e. gangs - to leave and decide it’s not worth being there anymore.
I’m not saying one should or shouldn’t necessarily do that (and take no responsibility for it as such), but if a community cannot police itself and make itself safe with its own members, for legal reasons or otherwise, then hostile actions would be a rational last resort of desperation. It is essentially a fight or flight response, and the creation of many suburbs in North America are indeed founded due to white flight. And if thinking about this makes you uncomfortable, keep in mind that legality does not inform morality, even if most of us toe the line when it comes to most things imposed on us, just or not.
That being said, “deterrent” crime is largely from an era bygone, while most crime contemporarily is driven by either impulse or material needs. It is far too proactive for an era where even self-defence has the potential to be harshly punished if you’re part of any demographics that are considered privileged while your assailant is not considered as such.
Police do not often take proactive actions to prevent crime or making a community worse that is technically not criminal, even if they have programs which make it seem like they do – their primary purpose is to respond to situations. In larger, more cosmopolitan cities, it is generally harder to enforce a sense of community, and instead things turn to social cliques, different from an established sense of community with common values, goals, beliefs and so on.
The key thing with suburbs, mirroring dense urban areas, is that there is a growing suffocation of identity over time, as community increasingly hinges around on bizarre corporate charades and performative slacktivism observed from various forms of media. If there is not a collective that stands up and attempts to form a real sense of community – which, of course, includes exclusion – that is not based on arbitrary feel good rhetoric about everyone being welcome, then it will die a slow, whimpering death, as I have seen in my time. While I am not suggesting that we should do away with hospitality entirely, these are dire times. The feelings and comfort of outsiders are ultimately less important than the well-being and identity of an established community.