A Tale of Two Cities
As a political moderate whose idea of open-mindedness is seeking to understand and appreciate all sides of a story, I realize my takes sometimes rile people up. When you feel strongly about something, others not agreeing with you, or even expressing sympathy for “the other side,” can be enraging. I accept that. Just as I respect you having an opinion, I respect your opinion, and I respect you holding that opinion so deeply that all other opinions are anathema.
Just as I’m allowed to believe what I believe. And what I believe is that, when it comes to many cities in 2023, two things can be simultaneously true. One is that they are wonderful places to live, work, play, worship, recreate, and parent. The other is that they are struggling with issues of crime that are rightly of grave concern and require meaningful intervention.
Perhaps these two statements above provoke no controversy. Surely this can be true, given that cities are both remarkable and messy, sometimes evoking great attraction and sometimes being quite repellant.
And, perhaps most people would have no beef with anything I’ve said before. For me to read too much into the tone of social media is for me to fall for the fallacy that discourse there is at all representative of the mood of the moment in the real world.
And yet people do post from a place of wanting to vent their true feelings. And, honestly, those true feelings worry me when it comes to how people view cities.
On the one hand, you have folks intent on sharing the worst of cities. Videos of crimes being committed in broad daylight, menacing mug shots, rampant debris. The takeaway is unmistakeable, and in case you are dense sometimes people will just say it explicitly: cities are to be moved out of, avoided, and judged.
On the other hand, you have folks intent on utterly ignoring these very same images and issues. All is well in our great American cities, and to say otherwise is to be privileged, racist, and hateful.
Of course both things can be true. Yet too much discourse in my feeds insists on negating one in order to validate the other.
An overly pessimistic view of cities in 2023 misses how amazing these places are. Rich in amenities, flush with opportunities to interact (by choice and by accident) with diverse perspectives, and dare I wade into another hot topic but our best hope for lowering our carbon footprint by minimizing our reliance on driving and sprawl.
On the other side, acting like any coverage of or concern about crime is verboten is a form of gaslighting that negates the real harm crime (and fear of crime) does to people. It is offensive to see the result of property and people being assaulted and worry about ourselves and our children and others who look like us, and yet to be told that those worries are not only unfounded but also hateful and abhorrent.
Many issues are truly polar, and that’s ok. You can respect the positions of people who are pro-life and pro-choice while having a personal stance on which one is right. Same with climate change or universal health care or masking policies. These are complicated things for which we sometimes have to agree to disagree, and on which I hope we can have reasoned and productive discourse, but I don’t begrudge that you have an opinion on the matter, even and especially if that opinion is divergent from mine.
But it can absolutely be simultaneously true that cities are wonderful and yet cities face very worrisome challenges. For too much of our contemporary discourse to try to shout that down to one or the other is troublesome to me.
Just as I’m allowed to believe what I believe. And what I believe is that, when it comes to many cities in 2023, two things can be simultaneously true. One is that they are wonderful places to live, work, play, worship, recreate, and parent. The other is that they are struggling with issues of crime that are rightly of grave concern and require meaningful intervention.
Perhaps these two statements above provoke no controversy. Surely this can be true, given that cities are both remarkable and messy, sometimes evoking great attraction and sometimes being quite repellant.
And, perhaps most people would have no beef with anything I’ve said before. For me to read too much into the tone of social media is for me to fall for the fallacy that discourse there is at all representative of the mood of the moment in the real world.
And yet people do post from a place of wanting to vent their true feelings. And, honestly, those true feelings worry me when it comes to how people view cities.
On the one hand, you have folks intent on sharing the worst of cities. Videos of crimes being committed in broad daylight, menacing mug shots, rampant debris. The takeaway is unmistakeable, and in case you are dense sometimes people will just say it explicitly: cities are to be moved out of, avoided, and judged.
On the other hand, you have folks intent on utterly ignoring these very same images and issues. All is well in our great American cities, and to say otherwise is to be privileged, racist, and hateful.
Of course both things can be true. Yet too much discourse in my feeds insists on negating one in order to validate the other.
An overly pessimistic view of cities in 2023 misses how amazing these places are. Rich in amenities, flush with opportunities to interact (by choice and by accident) with diverse perspectives, and dare I wade into another hot topic but our best hope for lowering our carbon footprint by minimizing our reliance on driving and sprawl.
On the other side, acting like any coverage of or concern about crime is verboten is a form of gaslighting that negates the real harm crime (and fear of crime) does to people. It is offensive to see the result of property and people being assaulted and worry about ourselves and our children and others who look like us, and yet to be told that those worries are not only unfounded but also hateful and abhorrent.
Many issues are truly polar, and that’s ok. You can respect the positions of people who are pro-life and pro-choice while having a personal stance on which one is right. Same with climate change or universal health care or masking policies. These are complicated things for which we sometimes have to agree to disagree, and on which I hope we can have reasoned and productive discourse, but I don’t begrudge that you have an opinion on the matter, even and especially if that opinion is divergent from mine.
But it can absolutely be simultaneously true that cities are wonderful and yet cities face very worrisome challenges. For too much of our contemporary discourse to try to shout that down to one or the other is troublesome to me.
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