Healing Greensboro
I'm working on an editorial on what it will take to build trust in Greensboro and heal some of the traditional rifts in our community.
Social capital studies cites a high level of giving and community engagement but also high levels of distrust.
How do we best address that as a city? What can we do as indivduals?
Comments (1)
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I think the problem, as posed, is part of the problem. To contemplate "healing" Greensboro is to imagine it as sick such that therapeutic strategies A, B, and C will cure it. When such strategies are strategized, employed, and (guess what?) fail, another round of self-recrimination, soul-searching, breast-beating, and search for new remedies. Human society is perfectible: we just need the right technologies.
Not so. Instead of a quest for the holy grail of a healed Greensboro, better, I think, to recognize that social divisions are inevitable, that the poor (as Christ noted) will always be with us, and that a healed Greensboro will remain unavailable for the remainder of human history. Moreover, the "healing" will itself likely render new wounds or at least reinscribe old scars (witness TRC). Healing requires that pathologies be actively sought out; it easily turns into the picking of scabs.
Better, in short, to think of Greensboro--realistically--as normally dysfunctional in ways that aren't, in the final analysis, that bad (at least if the rest of human history is to serve as a measure).
Personally, the cure is to hold doors open for strangers. The recent letter about manners expressed the point perfectly.
Posted on December 7, 2007 12:59 PM