A Time to Blush

Today is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Meanwhile, the situation in Boston is out of control.  So as many people that I care about are remembering the ways in which we were changed forever, another set of people I care about is seeing their own city changed forever. So this is a heavy day. And it should be. It's the kind of day when we are bombarded with stimuli that should make us want to turn away, and yet, with our twenty-first century addiction to the twenty-four hour news cycle and social media, with our movie-mania-desensitization, many of us are instead transfixed.

A couple days ago, a photo collage featuring gory pictures from the Boston Marathon finish line went viral. It was composed of pictures of bloody streets from varying distances and, most notably, a picture of a man with the bottom half if his leg missing, his femur exposed to the open air. My father, a now retired twenty-five year veteran of the Oklahoma City Police Department, and former Crime Scene Investigator, tried to remind others of the tastelessness of such pictures going public. He reminded us, in not o gentle terms, of the fact that such photos are disrespectful to the victims and their families and added, "I spent a career taking these kinds of photos, and I don't care to relive the experience on facebook." To my chagrin (I've reached an age where I feel responsible for protecting my parents, so I feel righteous anger about this) he actually received some flack for his hard line, including one passive aggressive questioning of his masculinity (of the type common on Facebook--that is, which may or may not have been directed specifically at him). Such a suggestion is a clear sign to me that many people just don't get it.

To my father, a police officer, and to my step-father, a firefighter, and finally to me, a second generation police officer myself, there is great honor, humility,  and a sense of gravitas in knowing that seeing these kinds of things is part of the sacrifice we make. Both of those men, the two most important men in my life, bear both the physical and emotional scars of April 19, 1995. In fact, I am often telling people that all first responder suffer from some level of PTSD; to what extent is only a matter of degree. But those of us with the introspection to be aware of it take a tremendous amount of pride in the fact that we run toward things others run from, and take care of things that others can not--and should not. We see things that humans are not supposed to see in order to shield others from it. And we take that responsibility seriously.

You see, humans aren't supposed to see horrible things happen to other humans. It's against the way we are wired. It does, despite our imagined toughness, effect us. Which is why, for decades, the media edited such horrible images. Consider the highly anesthetized newsreel footage from the Second World War:

To us, this footage may seem unrealistic, even sweetly quant. We may, God forbid, even see this as a sign of how much more "with it" we are in our generation, how much more realistic and world wise we are. But do we really think we were tougher than the Greatest Generation? This is a generation who lived through the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the most politically complex and technological war in human history. These videos aren't designed this way because this generation lacked toughness or wisdom, but because it possessed humanity and a basic sense of proper revulsion.

To this generation, one tried to hide that which should not be seen by others. It's not that people watching at the theater didn't know that what was happening "over there" was horrifically violent; the stars hanging in their neighbors windows would have stood as a constant reminder of this. It's that they knew that these were not things to be witnessed. For them, it was improper that the president should be seen in a wheel chair. Twenty years later, it was improper that a president's brain matter and skull should be seen in TV (The first time I saw the Zapruder film without blurring to hide the president's fatal injury was when my dad was teaching a forensics class. Not long after, the History Channel began showing the film unedited--a move I took as a sign that something important had happened--things had shifted.)

My minister friend, Ryan, tells a story to his youth group to emphasize the extent to which our own desensitization has cost us some of our humanity. As he drove one day, he saw an accident at the side of the road. He looked to the driver's seat of one of the cars, where he saw an injured woman from whom, "blood was flowing out." Ryan though, wow, that's bad, and drove on. He made it a few blocks when he suddenly felt overwhelming shame. He had just seen a horribly injured woman, and the most he could think was, wow that's bad. It cost him nothing, barely even slowing down his commute.  He had felt no emotion. It hadn't bothered him that he had just witnessed the suffering of another human being. And that shamed him. It should cost us when another person suffers. It should bother us. He stopped the car and prayed, both for her, and for himself.

You see, we need to feel revolted. Because revulsion suggests that we understand the human cost of these violent tragedies. The people in these photographs are not actors, they are not objects for our own voyeuristic catharsis. They are not bloody puppets in an Artaudian play. They are human beings in incredible pain. They are someone's wife, husband, son, daughter, mother, father. They are people who will be dealing with these scars, both physical and emotional, forever--not just until the screen fades and the credits roll. 

So, when my father lectures about the insensitivity of posting these pictures, people would be wise to listen. He speaks from hard earned experience about the tolls this violence takes on a human being. My call to any of us who still can, on this day in which we remember what happened in 1995 and pray for what's happening in 2013, is to keep what my two dads have lost. Keep your ability to blush.

Building Quality Community in Downtown OKC

I spent today at the Placemaking Conference hosted by the Institute for Quality Communities at OU. The highlight of the day, for me, was the presentation by Jeff Speck, one of the keynote speakers for the conference and author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. Speck argues that improving downtown by improving walkability is the key to better communities. Toward the end of his presentation, he addresses the objections he sometimes gets from community members from poorer neighborhoods who ask why improvements should focus on downtown rather than on their neighborhoods. After all, they want improvements to the places where they actually live. Speck's answer to this is entirely reasonable.

Speck argues that, since any renewal plan can't improve every neighborhood, it is best to do one small area very well than to spread resources and make a large area mediocre. For this reason, it makes sense to focus first on downtown, since this is the one part of the city that belongs to everyone.

In Speck's vision of community space, this is certainly true. As a proponent of what is often called New Urbanism, Speck's vision of good public space is emphatically mixed use (I think I may be quoting Kunstler here), pedestrian friendly, and scaled to humans (rather than to automobiles). Its borders are permeable, it's buildings interesting, and its aesthetics welcoming. It is truly democratic space where members of all classes intermingle and watch one another.

In contrast to Speck's optimistic vision, however, Mike Davis, in the essay "Fortress Los Angeles" from his book City of Quartz, presents an alternate view of downtown as purposefully constructed space. In the picture Davis draws, downtown does not, in fact, belong to everyone.

Davis recounts the "urban renaissance" of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s during which time the city underwent a serious makeover, mainly focused, it would seem, with making the educated middle class feel comfortable by insulating them from people they don't want to see. The most insidious of these "improvements" was the city's "experiments with community blockades." In a move that created de-fact ghettos (in the old meaning of the word), the city surrounded neighborhoods supposedly infested with drugs with concrete blockades in order to disrupt the flow of cocaine. But it also disrupted the flow of service industry workers into service industry jobs. It disrupted the flow of anyone living in the neighborhood to get out.

Though the blockades were being used in more suburban neighborhoods, moving downtown doesn't mean that the designs become less oppressive, just that the messages have to be a bit more subtle. There are without question, ways to make certain people feel uncomfortable in a place--to make sure they understand the signs that they are not welcome. Davis explains:

Ramparts and battlements, reflective glass and elevated pedways, are tropes in an architectural language warning off the underclass Other. Although architectural critics are usually blind to this militarized syntax, urban pariah groups--whether young black men, poor Latino immigrants, or elderly homeless females--read the signs immediately.

Disenfranchised groups have learned, often through bitter experience, the vocabularies of built space. They've learned to looks around and know that they are not wanted. For the homeless man, "No Trespassing" signs, blocked walkways, public park closing hours, and benches designed to make it impossible to sleep on them all work to tell him that he is not wanted.

Impractical "armrests" on OKC park benches make it impossible for homeless people to sleep.

If you are middle class and white, you may well find the huge police presence in Bricktown comforting. If you're young and not white, you likely find it a bit disconcerting.

There's great incentive for a city to make sure that the middle class will feel comfortable. After all, we have to pay for these improvements, and we pay for these improvements with the revenue that they generate. So, if a city allows the economics of building communities to take precedence over the human needs of all those living in the community, it becomes easy cater to those whose money is financing the improvements. The problem with the superblocks in LA, Detroit, and Atlanta that Davis mentions was primarily that they were designed to insulate the people they were designed for. A person working in one of these can easily leave home, seal herself in her car for the drive to work, park in a garage that is connected directly to the office building, and never cross paths with someone outside of her own socioeconomic milieu.

Such an arrangement is decidedly un-democratic. In such a model, downtown does not belong to everyone, but only to those whose comfort is profitable.

So, it's important for those of us who concern ourselves with social justice, and economic and racial diversity to remain closely involved and aware of public discussions of community building. If we see downtown as our most democratic public space (and I think Speck is right to), we must work to make sure that everyone is, in fact, invited.