Toughsledding

This morning wind and snow blow violently about my historic city neighborhood. I’m glad I live indoors and have the money to keep my heating bills up to date and the luxury of amusing myself with seed satalogs, garden diagrams and peculiar thoughts.
Take the word “historic,” for instance. The signs designating this neighborhood as such appeared at the entrance to this west side of the city’s railroad tracks a year or so ago. The word sounds pleasant and harmless enough, but we all know the term is really a realtor’s euphemism for “old” and an attempt to instill civic pride (equal to that in “better” neighborhoods) in those of us in the lower income strata who live here.
Because you see, the city fathers (quite literally male) want to insure that we mow our lawns weekly and clip our bushes regularly and paint our buildings, quite often on a schedule that doesn’t fit our personal timelines or finances.
And to top it off, we must keep everything green while conserving the city’s water supply.
They believe, as so many other mayors and city councils across the land, that if we do these things religiously, “they,” meaning industry, will come and revitalize the town.
Apparently businesses only approach towns and cities in which most of the character has been removed. Accordingly, businessmen prefer housing developments without sidewalks so the messy evidence of human habitation isn’t visible, as well as abhor untrimmed trees and overgrown vines. Children, those unruly creatures who torture a landscape with imagination, should stay in designated fenced-in backyards or parks, or preferably, not be seen at all.
I agree that forced maintenance and gentrification of older neighborhoods is preferable to bulldozing our cottages and displacing us, schuffling us into bland low-income, refugee camps(excuse me), apartments where pets and vegetable gardens are forbidden, uniformly designed cells for worker bees, caves in which the blue lights of televisions and computer screens mesmerize the masses replacing Cromagnon fires and rich, useful storytelling.
If we complain about the character of our neighborhoods being compromised by unfair ordinances, we become targets, abused even further by regulations few can afford.
It soon becomes obvious, that despite the public rhetoric, the goal of these rules isn’t human welfare and community joy; the goal is not to assist us in living pleasant lives in our homes surrounded by greenery and nurturing neighbors, but to improve the status of absentee owners and increase real estate values for resale. The age-old profit scam.
For many Americans, comfortable lives aren’t enough. More is required. More and more and more, and it doesn’t matter at whose expense the “more” is extracted.