"What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community...."[1] Poet T. S. Eliot, Unitarian turned Anglican, places the finger of his poetry on the pulse of life at the brink of the millennium. The longing for community is at the heart of the spiritual and moral quest. As Unitarian Universalists we affirm the "interdependent web of all being of which we are a part." Lack of community, religious or political, is an affront to our values. Thus, a theological preface to a practical problem.
The community of Monroe is in trouble. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, "there is no there there."[2] Most residents of our county probably wouldn't know what the term "community of Monroe" means; they wouldn't know it was coined by Republican County Manager Lucien Morin years ago. They know about Monroe County - the City of Rochester surrounded by 19 towns and 10 villages. They may know something about the 19 school districts, though they doubtless don't know there are well over 700 different political entities in this county. But the community of Monroe? What's that?
Therein lies our trouble. We have largely lost the sense of community. When people ask us where we are from we may say Rochester or Brighton, Pittsford, Fairport, East Rochester, Greece - or perhaps Park Avenue, Charlotte, South Wedge, Corn Hill or the 19th ward. Where are we from? What are the boundaries of our community? In Monroe County we don't really have a sense of one community, but a balkanization of tiny political fiefdoms, each jealous of its own prerogatives. What we have here is the gated Community of Monroe.
I have seen gated communities in the Third World: Nairobi, Kenya, for example - where wealth and poverty are literally side by side. When we visited our younger son there in 1995 I recall seeing a palatial mansion atop one urban hill. Surrounding this impressive edifice was a six foot stone wall with fiercely protruding jagged pieces of broken glass cemented in its top. To scale this wall would be to cut oneself to ribbons.
In Israel there are settlements in the occupied territories, enclaves of Israelis surrounded by Palestinians. It's fascinating and frightening. The existence of these small towns in the midst of a hostile population is a pivotal issue in the peace process. In 1991 I was part of a Unitarian Universalist fact-finding group that drove by one settlement. There was a 25 yard band of carefully raked dirt and a barbed wire fence encircling this community with an Uzi-armed guard at the gate. We were denied entrance.
In Macon, Georgia, in 1994, I saw my first American gated community. My host drove me to this exclusive part of the city where a wall had been constructed to keep "undesirables" out of a neighborhood. An armed guard checked us at the gate.
In their book Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States, Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder describe the first gated community in this country, Tuxedo Park, New York, whose residents began living behind gates and barbed wire, complete with a homeowners' association "to control the social fabric and the character of the architecture."
There are now over 3 million residences with over 8 million people situated behind similar gates, and demand is soaring. Some are staffed with 24-hour guards and patrolled by private security forces; some rely on electronically operated gates. They privatize community space, not merely individual space. They privatize civic responsibilities like police protection and street maintenance, recreation and entertainment. "Which came first," the authors ask, "withdrawal behind gates or the decay of a sense of community?" The residents of these gated communities are running not just from crime but from a larger sense of disorder and loss of control - over traffic, noise, incivility. Some are conscious of the anti-communitarian implications of their withdrawal; others defiantly defend their right to privacy and to live how - and among whom - they choose. They want to escape the messiness of a larger community.
Blakely and Snyder state "Their homeowner dues are like taxes; and their responsibility to their community, such as it is, ends at that gate."[3] One community designer said that socially the house fortress represents a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more isolated people become and the less they share with others unlike themselves, the more they do have to fear."[4] The gated community represents a celebration of the market as the ultimate arbiter in all things. Looking-out-for-number-one becomes the most noble of social principles.
Happily we have few such physically gated communities here. There are enclaves separated from the surrounding community, but there is no broken glass cemented in the walls, no field of dirt to discourage marauders, nor are there armed guards at the gates. Perhaps here the gated community is more of mind and heart than of concrete and steel. That attitude reminds me about a cartoon of a group of people seated in a circle of chairs facing outward, away from one another. Someone was explaining to an onlooker: "We call it the unencounter group. We just sit and don't bother anyone, each of us lost in our own private delicious thoughts and excursions."[5]
Two personal experiences illustrate the gated community of Monroe. In 1996 a Monroe County legislator called public hearings to consider creation of a commission to study the possibility of creating a county-wide school district. I attended one of the hearings at Brighton High School. One speaker especially disturbed me. He was a local TV personality who had moved to the suburbs so his kids could go to good schools he felt he could not find in the city. He wasn't about to give that up for somebody's social engineering. I could at least understand this concern until he told us he had heard that county school consolidation was really communistic. I was astounded.
When my turn to speak came I said something like this: We residents of Monroe County have forgotten about the Community of Monroe so forcefully advocated by, among others, Lucien Morin, who years ago had talked about a county-wide school system. I suggested he was hardly communistic.
Only a fool or a crazed bureaucrat would have designed a county with no less than 758 governmental units that can levy taxes. Yet we persist in insisting that each of 19 communities will have their own school system - with 19 bureaucracies. It is engaging in nostalgia to think we ought to preserve all these little fiefdoms - yet that is what is being defended by those who tout the status quo. If we would downsize or reinvent government, this is a good place to begin.
It is time to take down the walls that isolate us in this community - where the concentration of poverty in the City of Rochester, where I live, is largely responsible for problems in our educational system. In study after study low academic achievement correlates most with living in poverty and going to school with others equally poor. Achievement rises when poverty children are in schools with mostly middle class children.
The political boundaries which define our school districts are arbitrary and historical human contrivances, neither engraved in stone, nor ordained by God. Benign neglect quickly turns in malign neglect. It is time to appoint a Task Force to explore school district consolidation. What is there to fear - but the truth - that we cannot go on living in our Balkanized world. Human beings or municipalities all wrapped up in themselves make a mighty small package. The study proposal was rejected by the county legislature.
Then last November I attended a presentation by urbanologist Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution who spoke on "The Impact of Metropolitan Growth and Sprawl on Cities." He contended the dominant social trend is decentralization of political and economic life leading to urban sprawl - the reallocation of people and financial resources from the core city to the outlying areas. It results in gross inefficiency costing Americans billions of dollars and in the concentration of poverty in city centers. Furthermore government subsidizes that trend as infrastructures are built enabling people to work in the city by day and sleep in the suburbs by night. He wanted to change the city vs. suburbs paradigm to a more regional understanding.
At my table sat a millionaire developer who complained about city residents who were too particular about the kind of development they got. He apparently had the Monroe Theater in mind. It happens it is in my neighborhood. I had attended The Sound of Music there many years ago.
Most recently it has been the locale for adult videos and illicit sex, until closed down by the city. Developers wanted to demolish the theater - a classic piece of urban architecture - to build yet another Rite-Aid drug store. We already have one within easy walking distance. Our neighborhood idea is to transform the Monroe Theater into a community arts center. But, presumably, city folks should be happy with anything they can get.
Yet another example of Monroe County apartheid comes from the GRACE lawsuit, challenging the distribution of state funding for education. The Greater Rochester Area Coalition for Education takes seriously Harvard's Gary Orfield who says that when the poverty level within a school population reaches 75% it becomes almost impossible to provide a quality education. In Rochester City Schools, the poverty level approaches 90%.[6] We see that in our School Partnership Program. For example, every year we raise money for field trips assumed by suburban students but unavailable to poor city kids. Teachers reach into their own pockets for basic supplies.
We see this bifurcation of resources in the recent defeat of a $2.4 billion bond act to repair old schools and build new ones. New York State voters had just passed multi-billion dollar environmental and highway bond proposals. Apparently having all children in good schools just isn't as important as our being able to drive on good roads. Yet Clifford Janey, City Superintendent of Schools, says that Rochester needs $100 million in improvements. He can't get that from the city where 60% of the residents are low income and pay high taxes to support a regional core which contains so many tax exempt educational and cultural assets used by all the citizens of Monroe County.
Democrat and Chronicle essayist Mark Hare pointed out another problem in our lack of a sense of community. He said that Eastman Kodak CEO "George Fisher could improve Rochester's chances for a turnaround." But Fisher, the highly acclaimed CEO from Motorola, "came here to save Kodak, not Rochester." He said from the beginning that by helping Kodak he would help the city, and so he has not been heavily involved in civic affairs like previous CEO's who called Rochester home. Fisher, Hare wrote, is a "person for whom Rochester is a place of employment, not home."[7]
T. S. Eliot must have been thinking of us as he wrote, "What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community.... And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads, and no man knows or cares who is his neighbour unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance, but all dash to and fro in motor cars, familiar with the roads and settled nowhere."[8] When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?" What will you answer? 'We all dwell together To make money from each other?' or 'This is a community.'"
As one astute observer noted, "Drawing boundaries is the preoccupation of those incapable of building bridges."[9] And as Winston Churchill said, "Americans will always cooperate, but only after they have exhausted all other alternatives."
Whatever happened to the community of Monroe? It was hardly discussed in the lackluster contest for County Executive between incumbent Jack Doyle and challenger Bill Benet. There was one signal moment, however, a dispute over the definition of a single word, "WE." Benet advocated "smart growth," the attempt of a regional community to plan its growth.
We might say Monroe County was never really planned. It just happened. And now look at us. One of the wealthier counties in the nation, we have the ninth worst child poverty rate. There are 22,000 on the waiting list for affordable public housing. The vast proportion of public house is in the city. Homelessness and hunger increase as the new welfare law tightens its grip on the poor. The WE for Jack Doyle was "big - read bad - government." The WE for Bill Benet was all the residents of the county - good rhetoric, though he never really spelled out how smart growth would work. Who is the we? What are the parameters of our community? The resistance to anything resembling regional planning or smart growth reminds me of Pink Floyd's lyric, "I'm all right, Jack, keep your hands off my stack." As long as we can keep property taxes down, things are fine. The opposite of smart growth is obvious - the dumb growth in which we are presently engaged.
That attitude is aptly illustrated in The Gear Shift, newsletter of the Rotary Club in Tacoma, Washington, which headlined a speech by Jim Gillis of the Phillips Petroleum Company: "The Common Good - What's in It for Me?"
Not long ago I was invited to give the invocation at a meeting of the Monroe County Legislature. I'm a little ambivalent at this mixing of church and state, but I found it too tempting an opportunity to pass up. After I delivered a litany of statistics depicting our dangerous gap between rich and poor side by side with the biblical vision of justice flowing down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream, I resorted to prayer, which encapsulates my vision of the community of Monroe.
Unto the Spirit of Life we pray:
Blessed are the just, for they have their reward in indestructible integrity;
Blessed are they who labor in the vineyards of the public realm as citizens for they shall be remembered;
Blessed are they who love their community enough to praise its strengths and criticize its weaknesses for they shall be made wise;
Blessed are public officials who are responsive to the needs of these, the least of the people, for they shall be deputies of the community;
Blessed are they who serve the common good for their reward is in being used;
Blessed are the powerful who acknowledge their power as both gift and responsibility, for they know the binding obligations of their bounty;
Blessed are they who rebuke narrow-self-interest to sustain the commonweal, for they are the patriots the nation needs; Blessed are they who rise above partisan loyalties, for they shall administer a public trust;
Blessed are all people who seek justice in an imperfect world, for they shall be welcomed into the Beloved Community.
May we be among them.
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