  Today is a big holiday for our neighborhood. Everyone gets together in the park with covered dishes and grills. The idea is you get to know who your neighbors are so you know who doesn't belong in the neighborhood when you see them. In reality, this idea lands strikingly close to getting together with the pretty neighbors and giving the bad ones who are watching you from their homes the evil eye.
Several years ago when the neighborhood organization I worked for tried to use the event as an opportunity to drum up support for the building campaign by circling a petition, the neighborhood folks got real angry and said we were usurping their time with the police chief. Our neighborhood could be the posterchild for gentrification. It was once a groovy ethnically diverse, slightly run down neighborhood. Then for a while it was a groovy ethnically and sexually diverse up-and-coming nitche in the city.
And now Dubya stickers are beginning to outnumber the peace signs. Who really loses out there? The ethnically diverse. And it's these individuals who won't be encouraged to attend this "public" picnic. Needless to say, I'm not going. Even though I can see people setting up tables from this window in front of me as I type. I hope they see me in here and wonder why I'm not coming over. I really hope they see the pile of dead tree in front of my sideyard and wonder why in the world urlLink someone cut down a healthy, beautifully aged tree . 
