Chapter 7

Garden Zone Management

The duties of a garden zone manager will vary according to the character of his or her community. Some neighborhoods will require a greater emphasis on crime, or, in preventive terms, on courtesy. Others may not have a crime problem at all, but there may still be issues of fear and isolation. In some settings the walking patrol will be less about crime prevention and more about ritual. Even in a crime-free community, you still need to check up on people—senior citizens, the disabled. As we've seen, a manager could spend a good portion of his time keeping track of the kids in the neighborhood. Moreover, you don't need to be sick or old to appreciate a visit from a neighbor. There are many individuals who don't have physical ailments, yet who are not quite as able—emotionally, intellectually, intestinally—to deal with the complexities of modern life. This is especially true for kids without parents and many single women. They need a solid anchor, and quite often there is nothing to latch on to. It's disheartening to see how we turn our backs on such as these. I submit that even criminals ought to be included in our outreach. For, if we don't include the criminals, then by default they are working outside the community, and hence, against it.

So what do we expect from those who do get involved? What exactly are managers and volunteers going to do?

It makes more sense to turn the question around—what isn't there to do? We keep hearing from politicians about how desperate we are for jobs in this country. Do these people never look around them? Do they take no interest in their communities and consider what's required to maintain them? One scarcely knows where to begin. The issues raised in the preceding chapters alone could keep us busy for a long time. And when you think in terms of self-sufficiency, there is truly a lifetime of work ahead.

Let's get specific. You want jobs? How about finding Dennis Gale a job? This little task will put both you and him to work. Dennis is the homeless Vietnam veteran we talked about in chapter 3. As of this writing he still lives in the community, but it doesn't matter—wherever he happens to be, let's invite him back. Let's apologize for ignoring him all those years while he lived so precariously in our midst. We owe him this favor because he did us a great service. Dennis Gale gave us a mirror to our souls. He showed us how woefully deficient we are in the quality of compassion. Someone should follow up on this. Contact the Veterans Administration and find out why they're not granting Dennis a full disability. Call the D.A.V. and scare up a case worker. Locate someone with a room who can give him a break on the rent. Maybe we could get Dennis a job at one of the local businesses.

What about the other homeless in Camp Springs, including those we see panhandling on Allentown Road? It's deplorable for people to be living in tents and cars amid such affluence. Something needs to done with them. Whether it's an alcoholic, an ex-convict, a person with mental illness or someone who is simply down on his luck, we need to assess each situation and determine the best way to deal with it. You can't sit idly by and watch the guy die a slow death out there, like an abandoned dog. If we were going to do that, we might as well shoot them all now and get it over with. Homelessness is a grass- roots phenomenon, and it must be addressed at the grass roots. If there are government resources available, fine, use them. If there is money to be had, great, take it. But even if there isn't, come together and solve the problem.

Take Vera, the Russian lady we talked about. She is able to manage pretty well on her own, in her tent, but she has no way to feed herself. There should be a committee that can arrange a daily meal for people like her. And if we can't find accommodations for Vera, we ought to at least provide a drop-in center where she can sit, write, get warm, make phone calls, meet with people and so forth. Who can create this for us? Who can pull the right strings to, say, convert one of our vacant store fronts into such a center? There should be cars and drivers who can give a homeless person a ride now and then—to the clinic, to the market, to the metro station. The homeless need to bathe, to wash clothes, to get medical treatment. They need to get out of the rain. I maintain that none of this falls within the province of state or federal authorities; rather, it should be handled by individual neighborhoods and individual communities—by garden zone managers. Our social safety net, as it's termed, should, in fact, be tens or even hundreds of thousands of safety nets, installed in each of the hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods and communities across the country. There should be a safety net corresponding to every healthy adult. You are a safety net for your neighbor. To believe that Big Brother in Washington will forever look after us is folly. The top-down approach engenders a flawed paradigm that will inevitably lead to a social and political meltdown. Does the national government have a role at all? Sure, it can have any role we want it to, but its actions must never involve force. In an enlightened society, so long as there is indigenous knowledge, local authority must always have the superior position.

On a practical level, each garden zone manager should keep a list of people he can call on for assistance: churches, non-profits, businesses. He should coordinate his efforts with managers nearby. Ideally, the government—that is, the top-down bureaucracy—should not even enter the picture. Responsible people will do the responsible thing.

We could go on at length about the homeless problem alone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .text truncated

These questions have been asked before, of course, and the debate continues to this moment. So how do we find our way through the maze? Where does the rhetoric end and the correct action begin? It hardly seems possible solutions could come from a tiny group of gardeners in an obscure Washington suburb, yet this is how one starts. Grass-roots activity is how one grabs the world. Not just any activity, mind you, but that which is spiritually based. For that's the question overriding all the others: What if people experienced true spirituality? What if they recognized the infinite side of life? What wonders would we see? I submit we have already embarked on that road, that a spiritual awakening is taking place right now, at the start of the new millennium, and my sense is we will find out sooner rather than later how society will develop as this process unfolds.