My Redacted Life: Chapter 35

As I was about to be married and settle into a career as an urban planner, I had no doubts of success in either endeavor. Marriage was an accepted social mainstay. Likewise, my career involved an old and interesting field of study.

Learning about marriage was easy. All I had to do was look around and see how happy couples dealt with it. Most of them seemed happy. They owned new cars, had produced children, and were buying or building houses. I knew many of them from college and remembered when they had started dating. All I had to do was pick up points and note what led to a satisfied union. Emulation was the key to success.

My fiancée seemed to respond well to this approach. As long as I emulated her father and respected her mother, our union would be sound. She shared my distaste for social pressure, country clubs, parties, and the thought of most sports, save fishing. Sometimes we sat on my apartment patio and talked of the future. We agreed on almost everything except the quality of her favorite book and movie, A Clockwork Orange. I remembered that happy couples embraced mutual idiosyncrasies and we never quarreled about it. This marriage thing was going to be easy.

I learned, along the way, more basic principles about urban planning. My bosses had learned them in graduate school and they taught them to me. The most prevalent was that neighborhood schools were the foundation building block of urban development. They were to exist within easy access to surrounding residential development and would serve as the magnet for community life. There was no principle more important.

Armed with this priceless guidance, I pressed on against whatever currents that might appear in my river of life.

Many strong ones lay in wait. Consider for example, the married couples I had chosen to emulate because of their apparent happiness and contentment. Within five years more than half would find themselves divorced and sharing custody of the young children produced by the apparent happy union. It would prove a shock.

Oh, and neighborhood schools? What about them? Well, given the systemic cultural basis on which our country had settled, one fact had hidden from consideration. Neighborhood schools tended to be segregated. They also suffered from unequal funding and attention. A federal court ruling waited on the horizon, a ruling that would shape urban development in America as no other phenomenon ever had. The concept of neighborhood schools would be the first victim of a wrenching realization that cities, like individuals, often experience what psychologists call the “flight or fight response.”

This ain't gonna be no big deal.