Quote:
Originally Posted by LLN
In my experience, "safe" and "diverse" are frequently, mutually exclusive. What one culture values the other does not. Pay your money and take your choice.
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Yes, that's certainly a valid viewpoint in some instances. However, I would be inclined to consider that in most urban areas, while the two values ("safety" and "diversity") might sometimes tend to be inversely proportional to each other, they don't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. Sometimes it depends on how one person interprets the words used by another. And when words are misinterpreted, communication can sometimes be a damnably slippery slope.
"Safety" is what you make of it. And so is "Diversity." The following example may shed more light on what we mean by these terms:
We lived in one Arlington VA apartment complex in the 1980's that was perceived to be so unsafe that many of the local police were afraid to even drive through the neighborhood. It was extremely "diverse" ... after the end of the VietNam war, Arlington was getting a huge influx of refugees from every country in Southeast Asia.
Only problem was, back in their home countries, these different ethnic groups had been engaging in tribal warfare against each other for thousands of years. And some of them, when they got to America, still wanted to continue their ways of hatred, distrust, and prejudice. Many spoke minimal English, and it took awhile to communicate with them. In each building, there were about 70 apartments. Three buildings in the complex, totalled about 210 units. It was convenient though. LOL
In addition to the White Americans and the Black Americans, there had been an influx of Hispanics from various parts of Central and South America. They didn't tend to trust each other much either. And then when all the different Asian groups started coming in, things really started getting crazy.
The cops weren't much help, so Marjie and I started our own Neighborhood Watch program, with help from our Resident Manager. We created a newsletter, which I wrote each month. After we had gotten our newsletter translated into about 12 languages, our Resident Manager put the newsletters around at everybody's door. Each month we held a big Neighborhood Watch meeting, using an available vacant apartment. The apartments were huge, and typically could hold 120 people or so for such a meeting as that.
At each of our meetings, we had a speaker, provided by the Police Department or some County Agency, who talked about personal safety issues and such. And in each section of the living room, volunteer translators provided by a local college would translate our discussion into a different language.
And at the end of each meeting, we put out sign-up sheets, and started recruiting volunteers from among the various ethnic groups. Many of our volunteers were already combat-trained veterans, from somewhere, and they were very focused on keeping our parking lots and buildings SAFE!!! No matter what countries they came from, or what wars they had fought in, each of them had a good basic understanding of military discipline, and some sort of martial arts training or similar.
(Otherwise, they would have probably never survived and gotten to America.)
Since there had been several violent attacks on women who lived there and worked late at night, our first priority was to stop that. So each evening, we walked around out in the building parking lots, making sure nothing happened.
We had set up a phone bank, whereby any woman working late could stop at a pay phone and call ahead when she was on the way home (cell phones hadn't been invented yet), and talk to someone
who spoke her language, who would take down her information, including the tag number of her car, year, make, model, color, etc. And then the person who took the call would contact one of our outside watchers
who spoke the same language via CB radios.
Consequently, when each young lady arrived in the parking lot, she had two (or more) people to escort her from her car, through the parking lot to the lobby, up the elevator, and right to her apartment door. We always had at least two. I had trained them to always watch and make sure she got inside her apartment, and locked the door behind her.
Only after they were absolutely sure the person was home safe did our Neighborhood Watchers go back outside, to continue patrolling the buildings and parking lots.
Now our volunteers were amazingly "diverse" in such externally visible factors as the colors of their skin, the languages they spoke, the clothes they wore, the music they liked, the houses of worship they attended, and their patchwork quilt of backgrounds and skill sets.
However, they all proved to be amazingly
similar in that each cared intensely about such values as family and community. And each one was willing to put forth a considerable effort to help protect our neighborhood and those who lived there. The would-be criminals our group caught usually never came back a second time.
And on those increasingly rare occasions when
real "bad guys" might show up in one of our parking lots, perhaps intending to siphon gasoline, steal a car, or attack someone walking alone for purposes of mugging, robbery, rape, or anything else the least bit antisocial, the "bad guys" probably thought they had come up against a UN Peacekeeping Force when they suddenly found themselves surrounded by maybe half a dozen of our volunteers from all over the world, who made sure that the would-be criminals clearly understood that they needed to get off the property very quickly while they were still able, and never come back ... or else!
Within a few short weeks, the crime rate at our buildings dropped to ZERO!
Our army of volunteers were very enthusiastic, and achieved great satisfaction from their service to the community. And despite their ethnic and cultural differences, they quickly made friends with each other.
Our neighborhood rapidly became the safest place in Arlington County. The "bad guys" didn't even want to walk down the street past the parking lots that went to our buildings anymore. And very soon, nobody who lived in those buildings was a "stranger" anymore. Despite our "diversity."
We lived there for a little over 9 years, and might still be there today, except that the building owner died, and his sons didn't want to be bothered with property management, and sold them off as condos. We didn't want to buy a condo, and all of our international group of friends and neighbors were moving out, so we moved out too.
But in that particular instance, we actually managed to achieve a much greater degree of "safety" through practical and creative understanding and utilization of the best qualities of the available "diversity" among our neighbors.
Now if you consider
a different kind of "diversity" ... such as, consider a population that contains three groups of people: Maybe the first group all work for a living and go to Church on Sunday; the second group survive by shoplifting and robbing people; and the third group basically do nothing but get high all day, and plan to continue doing so until they die.
Nobody could successfully integrate three groups with
that nature or degree of "diversity." And nobody in his right mind would try.
And that is certainly not what I would call "diversity."
Criminals are criminals. Even though some of them may exist among us, they're really not fit to inhabit a civilized society. However, if you're a parole officer or prison psychiatrist, and you're getting paid to try to rehabilitate some of the "bad guys" that's a whole different situation ... if that's your job, you gotta at least try.
But even if you ARE getting paid to "rehabilitate" them, you still would NOT want to be inviting the "bad guys" over for cocktails and a game of badminton ... that sort of thing could get you killed.
And if you're NOT being paid to baby-sit the "bad guys" you probably shouldn't be around them or get involved with them at all, in any way, ever.
My original posting was VERY clear about what kind of community we're trying to find. And the content of what I wrote should have made it pretty clear what I meant when I used the descriptive terms "safe" and "diverse" ... but I'll try to clarify those concepts here in a more concise way:
"SAFE"
This simply means that we definitely
do not want to have to waste time worrying about roving bands of predatory thugs (of ANY race, color, creed, age, sex, political persuasion, etc.) who may inhabit what might become our neighborhood, and who might be hell-bent on destruction of whatever nature.
And we've never really worried too much about people like that. In the past, if we've inadvertently found ourselves living in an area infested by such vermin, usually a few sessions of sitting on the front porch cleaning our guns was sufficient to deter such low-lifes from anything more dangerous than casting furtive paranoid glances at us if they happened to walk by, hoping we didn't notice them.
At this stage of life, we'd rather not have to spend a lot of time sitting around cleaning guns -- OR firing them at human targets. We also don't want to live in any neighborhood that's infested by people engaged in any sort of "continuing criminal enterprise" ... i.e., dope dealers; prostitutes; stolen car rings; "gangs" of any type (regardless of ethnicity or political persuasion); and the like.
So a neighborhood that is generally regarded as
"SAFE" by those who live there might be more likely to be a neighborhood in which we might prefer to live.
"DIVERSE"
I think I have already explained pretty clearly in this posting what I
don't mean by "diverse" ...
Now here's what I
do mean: First of all, we want to live somewhere that is absolutely NOT part of either side of the bizarre equation that constitutes the "white flight" social phenomenon.
If you're not familiar with that term, Wikipedia explains various aspects of the phenomenon pretty well here, both in the immediate sense and from a historical perspective:
White flight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ideally, a "diverse" community is composed of population groups of people from a variety of ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds whose intellectual curiosity has taught them how to overcome most of their "prejudice" and fear of strangers.
Such a community is vibrant and alive. And in such diversity, each of us can learn so much more when in close contact with members of the other diverse "tribes" than can be learned when totally surrounded by nobody but other members of our own "tribe."
In large part, it has been that particular type of diversity which has built and strengthened America. As we learn from each other and apply that knowledge, the whole society benefits.
Any "plain vanilla" community (or "plain chocolate" one, or any other flavor you can imagine.) where everybody looks and acts and thinks exactly the same can quickly become drab and boring -- and pointless! There's no point in even bothering to talk to the guy next door, if he's just like you.
Where we live now is a very diverse community. We're all "different" ... and we all get along. Probably would not think of moving from here, except because of my injury I need to live in a 1-story house with minimal to no stairs at this point in my life, and 1-story houses are rare in Northern VA.
Dan
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Great Areas
Clarifying what I mean by "SAFE" and "DIVERSE"
