NIMBY

Not In My Back Yard. It’s a ‘thing’. Don’t know if it is a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’ or a ‘privilege thing’ or ‘a greedy thing’… but it is a ‘thing’.

When people wanted to flee the inter-city congestion, suburbia was invented. Single-family homes placed on similar grids of land for the conformity of the after-war propaganda.

Every house was the same, the lawns were the same, and the driveways were the same. On Saturday the lawns were mowed before the golf game and on Sunday (after church service) backyard barbeques filled the air with smoke. People knew their neighbors and everyone got along.

Then people moved and strangers moved in and paranoid privacy put up wooden fences. Children could still play in the shelter of a boxed in environment and dogs became more common.

The open land became walled off cubicles.

Not everyone had enough acreage to construct a golf course but swimming pools were installed. Wooden decks and brick patios held grills and benches and hot tubs. Some planted gardens or trees and some kept the wide-open green patch of lawn.

During the waking hours the children were off to school and the parents off to work or chores and the entire street and all the houses and all the yards were barren. At the bewitching hour, everyone would reassemble and shelter in place until the sunrise.

When a house is purchased, it is not just a building but also a plot of land. The fore founders farmers bought the land and then built a house, but this is suburbia.

The nightly news reports how many people are living on the streets. They are living under bridges or in patches out of the way of wandering eyes. They do not have antique memories or family legacies or doors that lock. When it rains, they get wet. When it is hot, they will sweat. When it gets cold they will shiver as all the rest of us sit warmly changing the channel to some silly waste of time, while we drink our wine…. Is this a crime?

Maybe this is what culture makes us, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have not’s’? Is it the privilege to wash and wax our cars then ride to a local dining establishment to devour more food than some people eat in a week and leave a tip like we are donating to a noble cause while others are scraping by begging for money or riding a bus all night for a safe place to sleep and stay warm?

The neighbors discuss their disgust over the problem of ‘homelessness’ over their fences. Some throw money at it so someone else can take care of it. Others just want the solution to go away like the weekly trash removal or the public housing reservations.