Here’s something else I’d never heard of – or, at least, never heard of anyone actually doing – when I lived in Orlando: National Night Out.
I come from Orlando, Florida, a city dramatically different from Modesto or anywhere else so far I’ve visited in California. Orlando’s always been a city of crime, transients and temporary living, and over the last ten years has gotten so much worse. Guns. Drugs. Gangs. A ridiculous number of rapes, murders and other violent crimes. People disappear with disturbing regularity. There are home invasions. Random violence. At least the serial killers tend to stick to the Daytona area.
You may have seen the ongoing media circus about Casey and Caylee Anthony. Orlando. What you’re not hearing is that this kind of stuff happens there every day. CQPress ranked Orlando as the 11th most dangerous city in the United States in 2007. Happiest place on Earth!
A huge part of the problem there is that very few people have any vested interest in where they live. It’s a fast food, Big Gulp, apartment rental, day labor town. People move there, stay for a few years, leave again. It’s an anonymous, faceless place of strangers. And so, when crime rolls into your neighborhood in Orlando, you mainly keep to yourself and just hope it stays out of your yard – which, with a little luck, it will long enough to let you move to one of the gated and walled enclaves of Lake Mary or Maitland.
I love living now where people actually know their neighbors. Where neighborhoods actually band together and fight back. Where people actually give a royal damn about where they live and whether it’ll be a decent place to live ten years from now – rather than just whether or not the local rat-themed amusement park is happy and profitable.
We went out for National Night Out last night, had a wonderful time hanging out with our neighbors. Ate food, joked. Compared notes and gossiped. The cops and fire department both came out to say hello and to let the kids play with the sirens.
National Night Out is a great idea. If more communities did it, we’d have less places like today’s Orlando.