Giving Up

I've been having a lot of thought lately about the act of giving up. A lot of was going on in our cities 50 years ago and since is the act of giving up. Here was this thing, this social urban life that we had created for millenia over and over again, around the world. And we walked away. We just became frustrated with our construct and we gave up. We moved out, left them to rot, and ... forgot. We decided to be guided into a false representation of urbaness, sanitized, distant and cold.

The popular history regarding this I think really glosses over a lot of things. I didn't live during those times, of course. I can only look at the urban anthropological evidence and see the pain left behind. It is easy for us to see the bandages. Some see the scars. I'm nothing special, to be sure, but when I look at our cities -- and I've looked at many -- I see the pain that is still there.
Cities, to me, are living things. The beauty they have is that they outlive us, by generations. They are the thing, the non-human thing at least, that we leave behind, for others to enjoy. And every wound that we give them is perhaps, bandaged up by the next behind us.

Our cities 50 years ago were really horrible places to live, I think. We look back now and see old images of what looked like thriving metros, full of little shops and bussling with people. But those are only the photographs. It must have been conditions which we, living today, can't begin to understand. Why else would carve them up and destroy every essence of realness that was once there? If they were so wonderful, why would we walk away?

Photographs are images, and images only. Your shoebox (or your hard drive) I'm sure is filled with images where everyone looks happy. But I doubt they are, inside the back alleys of the mind, pressed inside the tenaments of the frontal lobe, choked with the mental pollution that comes from waking up everyday.

Obviously, our collective love affair with the city was all for naught. We too quickly ran away from them when things were bad and ran into ourselves, our perfect homes and perfect lives. Perfectly separated from having to deal with other people and all the shit that comes with that. Now we've come to delude ourselves that cities are about glamour, entertainment and wealth. But they are not. That is the city that we don't try to get to know, the one we take out on the weekend, but never discover the true essence of it.

We gave up.