Urban settler
[Caleb Stegall  03/15 05:14 PM]

Good email from a self-described “urban settler”:

The difference between modern American mobility and the old frontier is that the modern version is about running away from perceived risks and threats. Barring the semi-mythical sociopaths who were always looking for "more elbow room" or to escape the sound of axes and the presence of neighbors (Daniel Boone, "Pa" Ingalls, and Cooper's Leatherstocking), frontiersmen and settlers in the old west went toward threats and took risks, generally with the goal of settling a place so they could cease moving. Contemporary suburban man tends to have this desire to escape others (as well as taxes but not expensive services and infrastructure) but with little tolerance for risk, danger, and delayed gratification.

As someone who lives on a crimeless block in a still seedy but slowly gentrifying neighborhood, and as someone who makes it his business as a free citizen to deter and fight crime, I personally have a very hard time not expressing utter contempt for the weakness of white flight suburbanites who compensate for their reactive life of fear and insecurity with SUVs and the idea they are being responsible, mature adults with their obsessions about property values and school district SAT scores. Bad neighborhoods don't just magically improve. It's not an abstract function of the market. It has a lot to do with financial and personal investment in a lot of hands-on risk and adventure. It can be lots better than the fearful imagine, and it bothers me to no end that among my neighbors who agree with all this, there are hardly any who would identify as conservative, although the most sensible ones see the feckless incompetence and fear of facing urban realities in many liberal politicians and talking heads. There are lost opportunities here in more ways than one.