been reading 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' by Jane Jacobs, and this particular section struck me as infinitely relevant to my current thoughts about the modern society:

"The people of cities who have other jobs and duties, and who lack, too, the training needed, cannot volunteer as teachers or registered nurses or librarians or museum guards or social workers. But at least they can, and on lively diversified sidewalks they do, supervise the incidental play of children and assimilate the children into city society. They do it in the course of carrying on their other pursuits.

... spaces and equipments do not rear children.. only people rear children and assimilate them into civilized society. ...

In real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalk do children learn - if they learn it at all - the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of public responsibility for you.When Mr Lacey, the locksmith, bawls out one of my sons for running into the street, and then reports the transgression to my husband as he passes the locksmith shop, my son gets more than an overt lesson in safety and obedience. He also gets, indirectly, the lesson that Mr. Lacey, with whom we have no ties other than street propinquity, feels responsible for him to a degree. ...

The lesson that city dwellers have to take responsibility for what goes on in city streets is taught again and again to children on sidewalks which enjoy a local public life. They can absorb it astonishingly early. They show they have absorbed it by taking for granted that they, too, are part of the management. They volunteer directions to people who are lost; they tell a man he will get a ticket if he parks where he thinks he is going to park... The presence or absence of this kind of street bossiness in city children is a fairly good tip-off to the presence or absence of responsible adult behavior toward the sidewalk and the children who use it. The children are imitating adult attitudes. ...

This is instruction in city living that people hired to look after children cannot teach, because the essence of this responsibility is that you do it without being hired. It is a lesson that parents, by themselves, are powerless to teach. If parents take minor public responsibility for strangers or neighbours in a society where nobody else does, this simply means the parents are embarrassingly different and meddlesome, not that this is the proper way to behave. Such instruction must come from society itself."

Ok i guess that speaks for itself. It's a very interesting read and she writes thoroughly although sometimes a little too long-winded for my liking.

many things can't be explained. like dreams.

it's not going away. hopefully it will be better when school reopens and everything returns to normal.