ARE YOU KIDDING? NEVER AGAIN!

"Are you kidding...? That ain't never going to happen again...!"

Which is how my friend expressed his mix of anger and schadenfreude. An aching mix many elders share these days when they share their park-bench stories of how folks used to sleep out in these parks on hot summer nights. What with today's drugs and violence, the thought is now unthinkable.

And yet, somewhat unsinkable as well. For there are always those reformers who have visions of a gentler and kinder America.Those thousand-points-of-light. Politicians...educators...clergy...oh, and those ever-hopeful parents who have heard the happy tales from their own parents about kids playing all summer day on their own.

Anthropologist Ruth Benedict offers some admonition: "The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer; it's that there are so many answers." And so it is there are those who would clean-up-the-streets by "knocking some heads together like we used to." Others would teach-in-the-streets by "putting education to work in the ghettos." Still others want to preach-in-the-streets by "spreading the Gospel."

What they all hold in common is the obvious -- to change a city you have to start with its most unchanged citizens. Those unwritten values everyone once inherited from birth (because their families had inherited or at least been dictated by them)...those social values have broken down. It's happened under the weight of so much political weakness, educational failure, and church&home neglect over the last half century.

In all the dazzling economic and global power taken from our stunning WWII successes, older stuffier values gave ground. Now our large cities are reaping the wind from those foundation-shifting successes. Grandness laced with crime, glamor tainted with poverty, authority thinned by liberty. It's still the same America ...only now fragmented into so many different stories of America.

Something like traveling in different foreign countries, each with their own language and laws. Exciting, yes. But sorry, sleeping in parks at night just doesn't seem to make as much sense (or safety) anymore...