Come-on now, You've always seemed to be a worldly person; you've surely spent time visiting people in those communities in urban areas. Do you really think the expense and unappealing aesthetics of the gates, tall fences, and armed guards are there to isolate those people who "choose" to live there from other people who look and behave like them.
Those impediments are there to separate them from the 'different', the 'other'.
In the case you describe or in gated communities, one type of citizen is being separated from another. I'm not saying either way is right or wrong ( though I do have an opinion), I'm just acknowledging what I see.
I love it when I visit acquaintances in those gated communities and hear them parroting multi-cultural phraseology and talking about their progressive political leanings. In reality, the main color in their lives generally happen when they are sitting in Starbucks , drinking a dark coffee; going to a professional sports game; or paying their gardeners.
I actually live a multi-cultural life. The next door neighbor to the south of me is a single homosexual man with an ex-wife and grown children; the next house is is a male homosexual couple (they've been together for at least the fourteen years since they moved into the neighborhood), my next door neighbor to the north is a nice guy, but a he is a homophobe who won't speak to the others, though he did help the couple once with a tree problem, he just wouldn't act too friendly. Across the street from him is a lesbian with a black male roommate. The neighbor across from me is a former racist who married a woman with a ten year old black daughter. My neighbor treats that little girl like a princess. The lady next to him is Jewish. My wife is Catholic and I'm just weird.
Our neighborhood is largely white and Christian,but with the welcome inclusion of the 'other'; And we tend to only wall in our back yards.
If you have to have fences around any part of a densely populated urban
area, it is because the social engineering of the past couple of generations was wrong; not because of a single elected or appointed police chief or sheriff, etc....bobford
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