Okay, so…
Here’s the thing…today I read something that said city people don’t care about the countryside and what’s happening to it. I could easily say the reverse, that county people don’t care about cities and what’s happening to them.
I don’t think things like this make sense. First of all, being born and raised in Chicago, the countryside to me, was the vacant lot on my block, before they built a house on it. There was a kind of prairie, a few blocks away, but they built a school on that. I did go into the “country,” which is now part of everything else, because I rode horses and followed trails that went by streams and trees. I also went into the Forest Preserve, but very seldom and only with a lot of others, because some of the people who go to the Forest Preserves are dangerous.
Never saw open fields, or anything like that. Played in the alley and on the sewer covers, which were the bases we used when we played baseball in the street. I did spend a lot of time at the park, which was surrounded by two busy streets and two side-streets. The wild animals we saw were squirrels. We tamed some of them and they would sit by us to get peanuts.
Really hard to even know what existed outside of the city when you’re little, so maybe that’s why those in the country, don’t know anything about playing in allies, or living with a tiny yard and a lot of cement, a few trees, and a LOT of people right next door. Jimmy, the boy who lived in the house next to the two-flat I lived in, would sit on his back porch and I would sit hanging out my bedroom window, and we would talk to each other. The only thing between us was a gangway. No open fields, sparse neighbors, or streams. We had garages and fences. We took buses and never even saw a real tractor.
The country is a foreign place to a lot of kids growing up in the city. The city can seem scary, or weird, to those who never saw it and grew up in a farm area, or in the country somewhere (are those two things both country?). My cousin’s cousin’s are always terrified when they come to her house, or when we go out in the city. Terrified. They only live an hour away, but they grew up in the country…which can literally BE an hour from the city. We just never go there. Why would we? There’s nothing there.
It’s not that we don’t care. We don’t KNOW the places country people talk about. Those places aren’t part our history, part of our lives. We don’t KNOW the details, the intimate parts of the country…just like they might not understand the city, even if they move there. Growing up in a place is far different from just moving some place and living there.
So, city people care about the environment, the country, and everything else, it’s just that for a lot of us, our environment isn’t the same as yours. When I read things about people just walking through the woods ALONE…OMG…seriously? Not in a million years, because the environment I grew up in doesn’t include that kind of danger. Our danger is a lot different.
It seems to me that no one really understands anyone else. Like being from the north or south, different ethnic groups, or city/country…our environment is something local, even if the world is home to all of us. Sometimes other people just don’t understand what it’s like to be from someplace else. People make assumptions based on their own beliefs, experiences, hearsay and media. That doesn’t make what they believe true.
The entire environment is in crisis. We care about it, but governments don’t stop what is destroying the oceans or the land, the air or anything else. It’s not city people, it’s regulations and laws, that even when existing are not enforced but paid off in high fines, rather than forcing industry to clean up their act.
So instead of saying things about urban or country people, I think we need to go after governments that continue to let companies get away with poisoning and destroying the earth and all the living things on the planet.
That’s just my opinion, of course.
Rethinking Life 
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