A SOCIETY IN LOCKDOWN (3/22/05)

Garrison Keillor noted the irony in his first broadcast from Brooklyn: “Why,” he mused, “am I doing a radio show from a place where every car has a sign in its window that says ‘no radio’?”

For Keillor, it was a joke about the absurd demands of urban security. For a little girl murdered in Florida, the question asked by the most hypercritical among us will be, “Why did a loving family leave a door unlocked and a sleeping child vulnerable?”

For Elizabeth Smart, it was a bedroom window. For Jon Benet, a basement entrance. “No lock stands in the way of a thief,” the Talmud observed. Certainly not in the way of pedophiles and child-murderers. How credulous and negligent, then, must one be not to lock doors and windows . . . and what else? Alarm a home for every contingency? Attack dogs? Tasers? Blow-‘em-away pistols in every cranny? All this and then some. Just listen to talk radio.

It must come as horrific culture shock to the folks in Friendly Village to need to gird themselves against the heretofore unimaginable: intrusion, violation, someone other than a neighbor at the open door, the fear of becoming fodder for Unsolved Mysteries.

Even we boomers who grew up in bigger cities have childhood memories of more secure times. In my Chicago neighborhood, we left our doors unlocked. We considered people who locked them snooty. Kids walked into each other’s homes unannounced. Answering the door would have been a nuisance. Moms watched out for each other’s kids; no one escaped the omnipresent eye; one strike and out for the day or worse.

When did it all change? Perhaps it was when we started living in anonymity, not knowing, and certainly not cherishing, the value of neighbors and neighborhood. It has become a cliché, but it does not diminish the truth: We do not know the people who live to either side of us.

Blaming the origin of our isolation on paranoia would be a confusion of cause and effect. It originated with the raging “self-ism” that replaced the centrality of the neighborhood-ism of the 50’s and the social consciousness of the 60’s. Self-promotion. Self-awareness. Self-actualization. Self-advancement. Self-you-name-it. No room for you in my life. Only self.

Mobility and self-preoccupation have made most friendships ephemeral or rarely attached to the folks next door. Some of us take refuge in our churches and synagogues and affinity groups, but the best of them are momentary safety zones.

We have thus resurrected the ancient notion that, even linguistically, a stranger is synonymous with hostility. Ironically, that has not made us safer, only more vulnerable. We nervously try to secure every breach, only to discover more of them, even more fearful that an aggressor will find another way to prey on our child in the nanosecond that the door is open or that she is picking a dandelion.

So, we surround our children with all the security we can find and with a pervasive sense of paranoia that drives them neurotic. We postpone until an undefined “later” how they will acquire their sense of freedom, with all its challenges and vulnerabilities, away from our protective eyes.

Solutions? There is only one way out, and it will be slow, generations in the making: Get rid of the self-ism. Discover your neighbors. Create a neighborhood. Establish friendships. Start doing things for others and with others. Look out for each other’s kids. Read Isaiah 58. Resurrect the virtues of trust and mutual protectiveness.

All that, and pray every day that God watch over our little ones, and that our kids remember to lock up the house and set the alarm before they tuck in the grandchildren for a night of sweet, untarnished dreams.

But let the bitterness still be ours. Every convict I have ever visited in jail has told me that whoever is behind bars is merely a matter of perspective.