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In our toughest neighborhoods, on our meanest streets, in our poorest rural areas, we have seen a stunning and simultaneous breakdown of community, family, and work, the heart and soul of civilized society. This has created a vast vacuum which has been filled by violence and drugs and gangs.
In some neighborhoods the fathers even when of an advanced age retain entire control of the farm and of all activities, and the younger generation are called the "boys," and, what is worse, are considered such till forty years of age or older in fact as long as the fathers live and are active.
His was not a chance "squatting" here or there on the prairie or among the trees. The necessities water and fuel led him as a rule to settle near a stream or river, and never far from timber. The pioneers settled in groups. One, two, three, or more families constituted the original nucleus of such groups. The groups were known as "communities" or "neighborhoods."
The estrangement of all things which takes place, within doors and without, about midnight may have helped to cast this doubt upon his identity; he seemed to be visiting now for the first time the streets and neighborhoods nearest his own, and his feet stumbled over the accustomed walks.
The commonwealth operated the few lines that were necessary for the collection of materials and the distribution of manufactures, and for pleasure travel and the affairs of state; but the roads that had been built to invest capital, or parallel other roads, or 'make work, as it was called, or to develop resources, or boom localities, were suffered to fall into ruin; the rails were stripped from the landscape, which they had bound as with shackles, and the road-beds became highways for the use of kindly neighborhoods, or nature recovered them wholly and hid the memory of their former abuse in grass and flowers and wild vines.
And the men who came after him, men, some of whom had drunk deep at the sources of philosophy and of study, were, nevertheless, also men who on this side of the water knew no complicated life but the simple life of primitive neighborhoods. Our task is very much more difficult.
In the present instance it is reluctantly conceded that there are few uglier or more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater, a straggling, overgrown village, with whose rural aspects are curiously blended something of the grimness and squalor of certain shabby city neighborhoods.
The social habits of our people have undergone an immense change within the past half century, largely in consequence of the vast development of the means of intercourse between different neighborhoods. Commencements, college gatherings of all kinds, church assemblages, school anniversaries, town centennials, all possible occasions for getting crowds together are made the most of.
Six years ago, I came to office in a time of doubt for America, with our economy troubled, our deficit high, our people divided. Some even wondered whether our best days were behind us. But across this nation, in a thousand neighborhoods, I have seen, even amidst the pain and uncertainty of recession, the real heart and character of America. I knew then we Americans could renew this country.
There were distinctly different neighborhoods in each of the narrow valleys that stretched two and three miles back into the mountains. Other areas, like Alewa Heights, were built on the faces of the ridges; at night their lights reached with sparkling fingers high into the dark. He found formal gardens, temples, and a red light district with hustlers of every race and description.
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