Fear and Loathing in New York

Yesterday I arrived back from visiting friends in Paris and while the flight there was hell and the flight back was just plain long I think it was the most relaxing time I've had in recent memory. I didn't think about work for a single second, I barely concerned myself with what I was going to do each day, I slept upwards of 9 hours each night and woke up at a leisurely time each morning, and I got to spend time with two good friends, who really are among my favorites no matter how much we differ on social issues.
Anyway, with all this leisurely time on my hands and with these two friends, who recently compromised on the problem of whose city to live in-Boston or New York- by moving to Paris together, I naturally began to think of my own living arrangement and where I would see myself living in the not so distant future. One of those friends, Nick, asked if I saw myself moving back to Boston and I didn't really hesitate too long before I answered not any time soon, but here's the thing of it that stuck with me- I don't see myself staying in New York either.
While there is much about this city that I love, there is also much that I do not. For instance, when I first moved here I noticed how one common thing to do was to have bars on your windows if you lived on the first floor of your building. Just starting out here I thought that was the most absurd and paranoid thing in the world. Living in Boston I spent two years on the 1st floor of a house with an open back yard, and open driveway, both abutting my three low level windows and I never once considered myself at enormous risk. For another year in Boston I lived in a split 3 story, again with first floor windows unbarred-this time with a shared basement, and the only thing that ever crossed my mind was that our apartment was really close to the street in a fratty-college district, and I hoped no beer bottles would come flying through a window.
Now having lived in New York for 3 years and just having moved to a 1st floor without bars, though surrounded by gates and walls, I find myself a little anxious at the prospect of not having bars. This makes me angry. It makes me angry that it has almost become a necessity in my life to cage myself into my home. Not a necessity necessarily based on the safety of my neighborhood, but based on my acclimation to an environment that seems to, on some levels, teach mistrust and breed fear. Living with bars on windows perpetuates a belief that safety can be assured by drawing further and further into ourselves both physically and emotionally. If we hide ourselves away enough and place ourselves behind our own bars far enough then no one and nothing can hurt us, right?
This practice seems further encouraged by the whole sense of isolation that envelopes this city. We don't want anyone to attack us or our stuff so we place walls between us and them. However, because we cannot necessarily judge who will and who will not cause us harm, we place that wall between us and everybody/everything else. We isolate ourselves within our own neighborhoods and as a result we fail to come to any real understanding about who/what is safe and who/what is not. The cycle continues and we perpetuate this isolation and fear, living our lives as if they include no one else and as though we have no impact on others and vise versa. It's a maddening cycle and its concerning to me that I've become a part of it. I don't want to live in senseless anxiety. While a certain amount of caution with strangers and home security can be advisable in most living situations, this is too much. These bars, this isolation, the strange way we keep ourselves oblivious to even the physical presence of another human being a few feet away in a subway car, each of these things by themselves may be minimal but all of it together just seems like far too much. On a greater scale it's as though we slowly become less human, less feeling, and thus become far more mechanized and absorbed in our own worlds. Its not a way I think I can live for very long happily-so I guess I don't intend to.
Now the other issue that's been scratching at the back of my brain and causing me to wonder about how long I'll last here is the focus of media, social programming, educational legislation, you name it- on the urban poor while ignoring the rural poor. Over the last few years I've had this strain of conversation with a number of people and have been able to observe the ways in which rural populations tend to get ignored for the purpose of providing funding assistance to cities. Now this in no way means I believe cities should get funding cuts in their social welfare programming, certainly city poverty is still a great concern. But the thing of it is this: not only does funding get geared towards urban populations, but so do studies, services, research programming and the like. People simply do not think that much about what poverty looks like outside the cities and the ways to amend this in those areas. Social work programs are geared towards aiding city dwellers, psychology programs, education programs, all of it is geared towards focusing graduates on work in the cities and while this is all relevant and important work, it does not take into account the entire picture of poverty, leaving out many individuals in populations across the united states who do not have access to important assistance because they live too far outside cities to qualify or too far away from major funding sources to get noticed.
So what does this all mean for me and eventually for the populations I want to work with? New York is great for many reasons, and while I don't plan on leaving any time in the next 3 years or so, the fact of it is that it does not and possibly has never felt like home. To tell the truth I don't know if anything will ever feel like home. Perhaps I ought to simply go wherever the next plane takes me, or the next idea or question. Maybe it will be the other coast, perhaps the middle states somewhere, or maybe I will find work in the UK-who knows, but its nice to think about every now and then- it keeps me on my toes and interested in my work and my life, keeps me asking those all important questions and going out to actively find the answers, and sometimes for me I think that is the most important thing in the world.