Gated Communities

Has there ever been a falser sense of security than the gated community? Who are you keeping out? Who are you keeping in? And why must Baby Boomers, the children of the civil rights movement, insist on an economic segregation that is often just code for racial and ethnic segregation?

When I think of gated communities, I think of telling the 80-year-old security guard the last name of somebody I know who knows somebody I know and yelling "sucker!" out the window as the rear bumper blows past the millimeter-thick piece of balsa wood (which in fact poses more of a threat to the residents' S-Class hoods than actual home robbers).

Do you actually think that if I was into raping rich, white teenage girls that I wouldn't just jump the five-foot faux-brick wall and walk through the never-locked side door at three in the morning?

Interestingly enough, gated communities are usually located in the safest possible suburban areas. So if it isn't the thieving scumbags you're worried about, what is it then? The just-as-false sense of self-satisfaction that you're living in a neighborhood filled with 55-year-olds that have the same steady income that you have? People that share the same virtues of hard work and family values?

Well, I hate to break it to you--but that guy across the street who gets home around 8 p.m. every night sells stolen cars and cheats on his wife.

And that other guy around the corner who's always home and has a boy the same age as your son got his money from his father's furniture store (est. 1930) and he stays up late every night doing coke and watching "American Chopper" while his wife's passed out on Xanax.

Not that he really rides a hog, but how cool would that be? Man, "Easy Rider" was a great movie.