Too close to home
Grania on Nov 29 2008 at 8:09 pm | Filed under: Soapbox
I talked to my next door neighbor while I was raking leaves today. She’s been unemployed for a few months, and hasn’t found anything that pays even half of what she was making. Her mother is a real estate agent who told her that the house across the street from me that’s for sale, as well as the house on the other side of my neighbors house are both in foreclosure.
I live in suburbia, where people come to escape the crime and bustle of the city. Good people, that want to raise their children away from gangs, drugs, and everything else that comes with city life. We’re not immune to it out here, but it’s certainly many degrees less extreme here. The biggest crime in my suburb is usually some punk kids robbing the change and CD’s out of unlocked cars. Most of my neighbors are from the inner city. We are quite the melting pot around here. They’re good people, nice, caring neighbors. They are also NOT wealthy. The kids next door think that I’m rich because I give them a can of pop occasionally. It’s worth it to see them smile.
The lady that lives in the house across the street with her kids is a nurse. It’s an expensive dream to live in suburbia, but parents make sacrifices so that their kids can grow up better than they did. They make sacrifices so the kids can learn how to be better people. It’s a lot easier to do that here than it is where kids can’t go out at night because there are bad people around. So they move out here with their little ones, hoping for something better, and the economy tanks, their mortgage is suddenly bigger, and there worse off than they were in the city.
It’s not right.
