I stopped to watch kids playing at recess – security was called

Is it a problem? Yes. It's a problem for them; they were very clearly unwell. Was it a problem for me? I didn't really know how to react as a kid, and more than anything else I remember being sobered rather than traumatized by what I saw. If anything has maladjusted me, I don't think that was it.

+ good public schools

In other words: we're talking about two separate things. You're describing an abstract quality of life concern, which is a valid concern that a lot of people share about major cities. I'm talking about a cultural zeitgeist around treating strangers as predators or latent criminals, which is statistically unborn.

(We can also play the anecdote game: I've lived in NYC my entire life, and I've never dodged human excrement or needles. I've seen needles and human waste, but they're a vanishingly small component of my experiences living here.)

Living in a big house is waaaaaay better than a living in an apartment inside a building. No contest here.

I live in an area where I see people out and walking. The local neighbourhood feels bustling. If I needed someone to watch my kid, I could call outside for someone from a number of faces I have known for years.

This is in a developing country. Houses are smaller, closer together, and without things like a driveway. I guess most people in the US still wouldn't want to give up these things. But I wouldn't want to live in a place where I never see people because they are all either in their house or their cars.

While lots of people in cities live very different lives, either you were very unlucky or this is your own fault. Or do you think the majority of the 8 million people in NYC have gotten a concussion since moving there?

The filth, yeah, it's neighborhood dependent but NYC as a whole (really anywhere other than right on Central Park) has a lot of room to improve. Pretty rare to see needles or human excrement (dog excrement is way too common).

The people that live there are what make it nicer. You can help and be part of the solution, or you can continue to live in your 1500 sqft kingdom and let Queen Karen out every so often to harass the local teenage serfs, er, service workers.

Have you been to Japan? High density is not the problem.

Agreed. Exactly as most of the rest of the world has done. In the developing world (India, China) and the old west (Europe), cities are the place to be. They are safe, easy to get around and much much more happening.

> without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted

This is such a west coast experience. I have seen this in SF/Seattle, but Boston/NYC's homeless have seemed pretty innocuous. It is local politics problem. Cities around the world don't have these issues either.

Cities continue to be expected to be havens for every kind of person, while suburbs create their own walled gardens. But if a city every proposes suburb style discriminatory policy, it will immediately be viewed as 'racist'. (Usually Racism of this form is just people looking out for their own socio-economic interests. I won't always call it hatred driven Racism. But, the standard west-coast suburbanite surely would) Because it is, and suburbs have been able to get away with massive unsustainable, economically draining and exclusionary policies for half a century.

> fights and the filth, got too many concussions

Where did you live ? I have spent my entire life in high-density cities and have never come close to anything like this.

Single-use zoning laws are a big part of why we have this model where everyone living in a house needs to drive just to get to the corner store, and everyone who can walk anywhere is living in a small apartment in an expensive city.

I grew up in two different suburban small towns, where we were each just a couple blocks from the corner store, the laundromat, and the local library. I could walk to my friends' houses to hang out, ride my bike around, and pick up a pizza for $5 to share with my friends.

It wasn't glamorous or fashionable like city life, and it wasn't as sterile as a housing development, but it was a good place to grow up.

I haven't been assaulted. I'm pretty sure the excrement I see is canine, not human. I haven't seen any heroin needles, though I don't live far from a methadone treatment clinic. And a halfway house for recently released prisoners. And am only a mile from the lakefront where we now have year-round tent camps for the first time in anyones' memory (homeless who camp through Chicago's winter are a tough breed).

Maybe the rabbits eat the heroin needles before I see them. Lord knows they eat everything else. Everyone on social media complains about the coyotes and how they're everywhere. But I think that's bullshit - if there were as many coyotes as people claim we'd have way less rabbits.

Surprising how much of what people post on the Internet is bullshit like that, isn't it?

No fights, no filth. There are plenty of places that fit the bill.

What a failure of imagination for what civic policy could be.

The idea is to build a social net in society such that you take care of people so that they never need to fall low enough to be shitting in the street or using hard drugs to get through a miserable existence.

This is expensive, requires compassion, and extremely socialist policies. The Hackernews crowd wouldn't love it.

But the money is there in society, it just requires a few less billionaires, and a few less multi-mansion lifestyles.

Anyhow, some advice from Amsterdam, NL (yes, the country of decriminalized marijuana and legal prostitution): we pay taxes and a significant portion of it — less so as the conservative government tries to shore up waning consensus with spending cuts to sustain windfalls for its constituency — goes to social programs aimed at housing homeless, supporting the addicted (often by addressing the underlying mental illness or trauma), managing dysfunctional families (which in several cases can be a bit paternalistic, but it also helps contain spillover to the previous problem class), helping sustainable employment.

Now, conservatives have systematically eroded all this societal infrastructure, but most of it is still here and it does help avoiding the situations you strawmanned.

Society is not a zero-sum game, it’s a force multiplier.

* It's a complex of things. I identify suburban culture (and car culture as a constituent element) as one member of that complex, but there's plenty of identifiable factors: increased passive awareness of our areas (24 hour news that chiefly spotlights crimes), passive surveillance of children (always available via cell phone, locatable via GPS), and so forth. It wouldn't be polemical if I didn't start with the controversial ones, though!

* Car culture and suburban culture are not things we've had for "many many many years." They're shockingly new, even by American cultural standards: modern suburbs are a postwar invention, and the cultural lodestone of being stuck in traffic on an interstate beltway somewhere outside of a major city is only a generation or two old. There are, similarly, external factors that have historically masked some of the more deleterious effects of car culture: redlining kept suburbs racially homogeneous for the first half of their history, and over half of women didn't enter the workforce until the late 1970s.

$60K/year tent, anyone?

The way that we have structured the mix of movement-for-career and rental precarity (at the lower end) suggests that we disincentivize "putting down roots" in the way that normalizes that kind of behavior.

This is a little bit of what I was trying to get at with the "dominant cultural metaphor": the US has undergone a fundamental cultural shift around strangers for the last 50-70 years. I attribute a decent amount of that to the alienation afforded to us by driving everywhere, but it has lots of other root causes: the steady erosion of local businesses in favor of chains, the professionalization of familial and community responsibilities, and (more recently) social media's affordance of cheap engagement.

And here's the thing: a lot of those root causes are good, or (at the very least) unavoidable! Our society is still pretty unjust, but it's a lot more just than when there was a uniform expectation that women stayed home and raised children. Social media poisons our discourse, but it's also made local organizing and event planning easier than ever.

At least here in Ukraine. Well, in some cities they recently started to congregate in basements during air raid alerts, but that's hardly a positive thing. And I've heard that in Belarus, during 2020 protests, when the whole country got disconnected from the Internet for a couple of days, people really hanged out IRL much more.

Additionally, large leasing companies set rents to maximize profits, at the cost of turnover. It's hard to feel part of a community when people are constantly leaving and new people arriving. Residents can't feel like they belong when they expect to be priced out and forced to move in a year or two.

Capitalism produces efficient allocation of capital, but not maximum citizen quality of life.

USA needs housing coops like there are in Denmark: https://stories.coop/stories/kab-how-cooperative-housing-wor...

This is what makes the USA society so impersonal and distant. Everyone is expected, even required, to quickly retire into their home and stay there unless on specific business of going somewhere. The USA has even invented a crime for the concept of being outside for no particular reason, "loitering".

Coming from latin america we joke (although wrapped in much sadness) that every fun social activity that's normal elsewhere, will trigger the riot police to show up in the USA. When I lived in an apartment I knew everyone in the building since we'd gather to drink and play games on the central hallway on Friday nights.

So no wonder it is difficult to get to know any neighbors in the USA, let alone the entire neighborhood. Which in turn makes it easier to not care about them, which I believe is the cause of most of the social and political ills of the USA.

Very little to do with cars. Where I grew up the public transport was between useless to nonexistent, so everyone drives everywhere. But people still have fun and hang out and party on the streets or apartment hallways.

It’s led me to a theory that density limits interactions by excessive choice. We drive everywhere here (the OP original claim that was the alienator), but the entire county, 18,000 square miles, has 44,000 people in it and I see the same people at the gas station, the grocery store, the coffee shop, every time I go. So I still end up meeting people eventually just by routine.

It’s also weird how you can start to spot outsiders - the gas station I use has developed some weird social pattern that you always enter from the south and thus the cars always face the same way, so visitors don’t know that and you spot them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Quik_meth_myth

Yes exactly. So we segregate them, creating a non-bourgeois underclass that plagues our cities and suburbs. Then we create more elaborate car centric human geography that causes us to pollute more and generate all sorts of externalities such as huge traffic jams and high house prices. Then because the above underclass is disregarded, they become a larger, more present part of our urban fabric who we've consigned to a segregated life of misery.

It's a lose-lose race to the bottom. All because we can't do the right thing, spending money on mental health care and assistance out of poverty. Eventually the (monetary but also human, social, and environmental) costs of maintaining the hacks ends up being higher than fixing the problem in the first place. That's what happens when you try to paper over problems without fixing them.

And you're reading too much into the white part: the history of middle class suburbia is the history of America's white middle class, which is in turn more or less the history of America's race politics. It's not a particularly searing or piecing observation on my part.

The later in USA is not hard to see even as a foreigner.

Okay, their perception of crime is higher than it should be. What about the level of crime inside vs outside of the gated community?

It really doesn't matter if someone thinks that there are 4 rapes per second outside of their bubble, if the rate inside the bubble is significantly lower than the rate outside the bubble.

Thinking that it is 4 rapes per second when the actual number is 4 rapes per month is irrelevant when there are 4 rapes per decade inside the bubble.

IOW, you are not making any point worth discussing. I don't care whether my perception of crime outside of my bubble is higher than the actual crime outside of my bubble, I care whether it is more dangerous outside of my bubble than inside.

Re 'candy shop' - it was about 400 feet from the restaurant.

This is New York's, for example:

> 1. He or she knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to his or her life or health; or

Whether something is "likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child" is fairly subjective, since it's a balance of odds.

> But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays

I think this may be true, but also I think parents might find it easier to let their kid play video games in their room where they think they are safe compared to letting them roam around unsupervised. I had friends whose parents thought we were bad kids because we wouldn't know where would go that day, so when they asked "where are you going" and we said "idk, to the creek or pizza or wherever we find interesting" they would think we were up to no good since we didn't have a plan.

The funny thing is back then there were no sidewalks or shoulders at all, and kids biked everywhere until old and lucky enough to drive. Now, there are extensive sidewalks on all the main roads, but the only people using them are middle aged dog walkers.

Sadly never crossed my mind to figure out what time the lights turned on, and expand my radius further.

Osama may be dead, but the erosion of rights that US has seen because of 9/11 did strike a big blow to US democracy and he partly achieved his goals.

Like sending your kid to the shop. There's also the fact that we don't need to do that anymore. Very often there's a late (or all) night shop open not too far away. So the urgency is just not there.

Read.

No, it seems like someone (read: you) making a lot of assumptions and jumping to conclusions.

Edit: Oh man, the absolute irony of you telling someone to "think" further down in this thread...

https://reason.com/2021/04/29/reasonable-childhood-independe...

There was one time where a guy in a truck slowed down and was lagging behind us a bit. We turned down a side street and he kept following us. We were on sidewalks, so we just turned around quicker than he did and raced away. In retrospect that was legitimately scary.

In middle school, I could ride wherever I wanted. I'd ride to garage sales, buy used puzzles, then spend hours completing them at home. To think that those opportunities wouldn't be available is sad.

>And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.

In grad school I worked with a fellow from China. At the age of 3, he would go to the nearby market to buy some groceries for the family, cook food, and hang out at home alone all day. He was shocked at the attitudes in the US.

Once a red Volvo 240 stopped and tried getting my brother to approach for some candy. I pulled him away and we went inside, because I'd heard rumours about some dude in the area trying to nab kids. I was about eight and he was six.

Because we had learned to not talk to strangers that weren't our parents or relatives or public officials like police, medics and fire crew in uniform or in uniformed vehicles. If someone stops while we're waiting for the school bus and offers to drive us home it's not OK to get in the car unless our parents had asked our teacher to tell us that one specific family member would pick us up.

Basic good upbringing, really...

My papers were dropped off really early, and I had to be there for them - alone - around 4am. And my route was about half a mile away from my house.

I got chased by a dog a couple times. One time it bit and punctured my tire.

I flipped my bike with all the papers in it a couple of times.

Some older kids dropped by once - I was afraid they were gonna fuck with me, but instead they just asked me to scream some stuff.

And of course collecting. I got chased off by a couple dogs then too. Come to think of it, maybe I should be more afraid of dogs than people.

Eventually I got a route for the apartments that were across the street from my house. That was a much nicer experience. More money, less distance, less area to cover, and no dogs.

> Children under four years of age may only use public transportation if they are accompanied by an individual who is at least six years of age.

I used to live across the street from a primary school and the kids (no older than 10) would come out and smoke at recess in front of my building. Nobody batted an eye. Just yesterday I was walking behind some kids who couldn't have been older than 12 drinking and smoking, and that was in a nicer Berlin "suburb". Nobody cared.

As a personal anecdote: I grew up in NYC, and was riding the subway alone by the time I was 8 or 9. I believe there’s also around when my school gave me a free metrocard to travel on my own, and I believe that program is still in place. Most of my NYC friends had similar experiences.

Then reality hit: I could get in big trouble and my benign motive would be a useless defense. I biked past, lamenting the loss of a terrific photo.

Enough with characterizing millenia-long human behavior as "our modern societies"!

What would have happened afterwards is hard to say, but once the police get involved... well, bad things have certainly been known to happen.

My wife is a manager and sits in meetings all day long. I'm still half individual contributor and I'm the one who can easily take calls most of the day. I don't have to explain this very often, but it still feels like once too many.

Point is, it just has to be normalized, but without significant paternity leave, it probably won't.

The reality is that we don't really experience the world outside of our bubbles!

But I can totally believe this description.

It's horrible this happens :-(

There are some advantages to this as a level of competence does filter down to the street level (as a small example having lived in multiple AU cities as well as US cities, far far more people litter in US cities than Australian ones) but it does have negative impacts.

A recent example is the appalling treatment of overseas Australians by their government during Covid where the border was closed and many Australians were effectively barred from returning to their country for over 2 years.

There are for sure social gaps and service gaps, but assaults in the street like the GP is describing seem... far fetched.

Just wondering, is it the case for college professors in the US? should they be careful not to be alone in a room with a student or is that a myth?

I’m shocked they’re allowed to be in a room alone with a single child unless they have clear visibility from the hall. My school has that and cameras.

I know a then 14-year-old guy from a game store where I’d played D&D with his mom for two years. I was 30~32 at the time.

Some people I know thought it was creepy as hell I went with his mom to see a high-school play he was in. His acting wasn’t great but we all had fun.

I don’t get it. I really don’t. The people I was with and quite a few of my friends didn’t understand that reaction either.

Plenty of teenagers need a good father figure or mentor.

That's... incredibly sad. I'm sorry to hear that.

The saying goes though, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

We proactively need to defund the road to hell.

So the context of that kid, he learnt that stuff at home. His parents were famous for calling the police and city on their neighbours. The peak of it was July 1st, people were firing off fireworks. They called the police to say someone was shooting/bombing their house. The police obviously show up in force big time. They closed blocks of the neighbourhood only to later find out they had a history of false police reports. False firefighter stuff saying open pit fires of their neighbours were illegal. etc.

After the tattle involving me. Me and my friend were taken aside and were very explicitly explained to what we should do. This is our fathers and teachers in the same room. They knew we would want to fight but they said no, you simply never talk or be near that kid again. Complete social ostracizing, never touch the kid. Except after we started doing that... we'd be playing foot hockey and if he'd ask to join, we'd immediately stop playing and say we were done and walk away from him. A few times he ran to steal our tennis ball and demand to be included. The whole class got in on it. Literally nobody would talk to him or talk near him.

My brother in a younger grade did the same knowing he might tattle on them. Older grades did the same. After a couple weeks of literally no one talking to him, he would spend recess standing next to the teacher. Then he disappeared for a couple weeks. He ended up in the hospital with what I would expect to be psychiatric issues. Can you imagine being socially isolated in elementary school?

When he got back? We were all evil and should be punished blah blah. His new job was to ensure the teachers knew about every infraction anyone did. He doubled down on it, didn't work out when he went after a 2 grades older bully and got quite injured. Nothing major, serious bruising. The teachers were even hesitant to help him. Then one day he comes up to me like first thing in the morning saying his parents want me and my friend to come to his house. I was like hell to the no.

Then few days later I didnt even do anything wrong and teacher demanded us and our parents be at the school for a meeting. We were expecting suspension but ended up they wanted to make peace. His parents were very concerned but were so angry when I explained what happened. I refused to agree to any peace, that I had done nothing wrong. Which got most of the room chuckling... but after that day he sure stopped his tattling.

Say you have 10 parents that let their kids play outside. No one has a problem with this until an 11th parent shows up and it mortified, think the kids will all get hurt if they are allowed to be outside like this.

That parent makes a stink, take it to the city council, and a rule is put in place that you can't let your kids go outside without supervision. The folks making the rules think to themselves "well we had to act, there was such an outcry". Meanwhile the outcry is really just the outsized screams of one parent, and you've just screwed the other 10 parents.

Its quite possible that increased organized sports and after school activities (particularly robotics, math, computer science) could actually improve the capabilities of society as compared to just leaving the kids unattended after school.

I agree that kidnapping is probably at an all-time low, but it's an unbelievable claim that it's all "family members during a nasty divorce or things like that." I personally know a family who's kid was kidnapped (briefly) by a non-family member.

> "Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.

That's not what's going on here. It's a cultural issue. You've got a longstanding issue with crime, especially particularly "worst fear"-type crime, getting disproportionate attention in the media, creating false impressions and seeds for fear-fantasies. Now, added to that is new cultural obsession with abuse and victim-hood; and the idea of completely stamping that out is possible, and it should be achieved whatever the cost.

You might have a politicians exploiting this cultural issue to accomplish other things, but they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.

Also, many Americans live in HOA communities with regulations that make Switzerland look like libertarian utopia.

I've lived here for >25 years and am often outside my building smoking cigarettes(!). The "play area" for the kids is on the other side of my (and one other, total ~100 feet distance) building and classes are brought in and out most of the day.

No one has ever even looked at me (AFAIK) as a potential threat, and no one (school staff, parents or police) has ever asked me to "move along," or wanted to know why I was hanging around next to a school.

And living in NYC, it's not like folks will recognize me as one of the people who live in one of the 20 apartments in my building either.

In fact, I've only had positive interactions with school-related adults despite the "suspicious" behavior I display as an adult male "hanging around" an elementary/middle school "watching" the kids.

I can't say whether my experience is more common than that of TFA's author.

I do note that many parents (not that it's a bad thing necessarily) drop off/pick up their kids at school (this is NYC, so mostly not in cars, but to walk them home/wherever they need to go) at ages (8+) when I (and most of my classmates) walked to/from school (my elementary school and and this one are less than a mile apart, but 40+ years distance in time) all by ourselves with no issues.

In fact, we'd usually just go straight out to the park and play until dark, then go home.

Back then (mid-late 1970s), NYC was much more dangerous too.

As such, it seems to me that these changes are less about "keeping kids safe" and more about "security theater" to appease helicopter parents.

I could be wrong, but it seems like that's the most likely driver.

No? That'll be $$$$ then.

No need to explain anything to the cop, and in fact you shouldn't say anything. "Am I free to go?" "No?" "Ok, I invoke my right to silence and I want my lawyer".

The media and propaganda have done an amazing job convincing citizens that we have to explain our totally legal behavior. No. It is up to them to identify a crime that is being committed and if not, then just ignore them. Be prepared to get arrested.

Now, if you aren't absolutely sure that you aren't breaking the law, then stop fantasizing about winning an argument with a cop (GP).

Nobody gets a finger pointed at them for the slow institutionalization of instilling paranoia in children.

But have it come out that you saw the stranger who shot up the school and didn't call security...?

It's pure CYA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

    United States    288
    Mexico           8
    South Africa     6
    India            5
    Nigeria          4
    Pakistan         4
    Afghanistan      3
    Canada           2
    France           2
    Brazil           2
    Estonia          1
    Hungary          1
    Azerbaijan       1
    Greece           1
    Kenya            1
    Germany          1
    Turkey           1
    Russia           1
    China            1

sigh

Statistics may indicate greatest risk is people you know, but that's an average. Ultimately it's best to take reasonable precautions and teach kids what behavior to watch for, healthy boundaries, and how to react.

I definitely sympathize with the author. As a male, I would expect an even stronger reaction to hanging around watching kids with no clear intent. As others have pointed out, even if you're not committing a crime you can be in for an unpleasant response. It's sad that there are creeps out there. It's sad that as a result, certain innocent behaviors make others nervous (rationally or irrationally). It also gives me a small taste of what it's like to be judged by my category/appearance.

[1]https://www.losangelescriminallawyer.pro/california-penal-co...

I tried to keep myself clean, but even on my poorly groomed days people just assumed I was some random neighbor taking a walk and moved on without suspicion. Most people don't want to talk to their neighbors so if you look friendly they will avoid you.

Had she stuck around and talked with the police, security and the childcare would have learned that the author was allowed to watch the kids.

I’m not judging her as a bad person or anything. But I think she’s part of the reason society has these behaviors. Because she’s not willing to fight stupid policies when the cost is just to wait politely.

If people were more stringent to try to help others learn right and wrong we’d be in a better place.

It’s quite possible that this security guard does think it’s illegal and wrong to watch kids. No one is willing to teach them what’s correct. If not people like the author, then who?