Creating Safety in Unsafe Times
How symbols of community care make us safer and braver
Someday soon, this building will stand on its own, while we, we will be the trees that protect it from the fierce wind, the trees that will give shade to children sleeping inside or playing on swings.
When I was a child growing up in New York, there were these ubiquitous bright yellow signs in local store windows that I knew meant a grown-up would help me if I needed help. They said, “Safe Haven,” in big block letters, and their audience was neighborhood kids. If you were feeling unsafe for any reason, or if you simply needed to call home, you could look for a store with a yellow sign, assured that the adults inside had promised to help. Because that’s what the signs were—a visible promise between strangers to care for the community’s kids.
Though those yellow decals were surely tied, in part, to the genuine safety issues of a city still crawling its way out of the previous decade’s fiscal crisis and, in part, by the mythologized panic of child abduction in a post-Etan-Patz city, they didn’t really carry any particular political weight. Primarily, the yellow signs were simply a practical community tool in the age before cell phones, when, despite the fact that our parents couldn’t track us with GPS or text us at every flash of worry, children had much more freedom. We moved through our neighborhoods and eventually the city largely unsupervised, starting when we were much younger than most parents would permit today. The city of my childhood was rough around the edges. There was more garbage and more graffiti and more homelessness, and, yes, more crime. But I don’t remember feeling afraid, and I think the yellow signs were a small indicator of why—even as young children in a big, busy, complicated city—none of us were particularly timid about the world.
Looking back, I think the yellow signs signified two important things. First, they meant that there were adults in the world who were not directly responsible for us—they were not our parents or our friends’ parents or even our teachers—but who were, nonetheless, available to us and willing to take responsibility for us. Second, the signs connoted a very practical sense of general neighborhood connection and care, even within a big city. This was surely a byproduct, in part, of streets that were still lined with more local businesses than are the norm today, which, among many other benefits, reduced anonymity and created the feeling of interconnected mutual dependence that defines a true neighborhood. It turns out these symbols of community connection, not the ability to remain in constant contact with each other or to digitally track each other's whereabouts, are the features of daily life that make us feel safe and, in turn, that make us feel brave. Because it is easier to be brave when we believe that the radius of people who care about our wellbeing extends farther than the immediate reach of our most intimate relationships, beyond our parents and our closest friends to encompass our entire community.
As the journalist, Kristen Iversen, has written of growing up in New York in the eighties,
“We don’t want to minimize the fact that crimes like mugging and graffiti were much more common occurrences…we remember riding those grimy, tagged Redbird cars, and we remember our excitement at the introduction of the new cars—gleaming and silver and full of yellow and orange seats—that now seem old and somewhat grimy themselves…We remember the Riverside Park playgrounds with splintered equipment and being hustled through Times Square very quickly…We remember all these things.
But we also remember how our neighborhood was full of stores owned by people who actually worked in them, and how the butcher would give us slices of bologna to munch on…We remember that magical feeling of not only being a part of an intimate community, but also something larger and grander than we could ever really know at that age but happily knew we’d spend a lifetime trying to figure out. We don’t remember feeling afraid. We don’t remember it as a horror show. We remember it simply as our childhood, one we shared with millions of other people.”
Being brave isn’t just about overcoming fear or developing inner strength. Bravery is also about feeling connected and by extension feeling safe to take risks, knowing we have a net. As young children, we were able to be brave and autonomous in a city that many adults who didn’t live there were afraid to even visit, because we felt we were part of this network of extended care.
As I’ve written before, community bonds and strong relationships make us braver, because when we know each other we are more likely to feel compassionately toward one another, and we are, therefore, more likely to feel invested in standing up for each other. But strong communities also make us braver because they create a feeling of trust and mutuality, not only among those we know well, but even among strangers. Surely it’s a powerful experience to be able to go into a shop or a restaurant where everyone knows our name and feel a sense of belonging. But when we can also go into a space where we don’t know anyone and aren’t known ourselves and still trust that we will be looked after and treated with kindness, that is an even more significant indicator of interdependence and of genuinely strong community ties. And that extended interdependence facilitates a different capacity for care and for courage among everyone within its reach.
In a small but meaningful way, I think the power of those little yellow signs also points to the difference between gestures of performance and gestures that might be labeled “performative,” which I wrote about last week. The symbolic public gestures that are effective, and that change the way we understand and relate to one another, often also serve a practical role in signaling where we are safe.
I read a social media post this week by the ecologist, Sarah Winnicki, in which she noted that she was surprised, after hanging a pride flag outside her door in her very red community, that it seemed to transform her home into a safe point for a wide range of people, not just LGBTQ+ people. She said,
“I was scared to first put up a queer pride flag (red state resident) but the biggest surprise was how much more often people stopped by my house asking for help: stuck motorists, unhoused neighbors, etc. Some told me outright that the flag made them guess that I cared about them and that's correct.”
In periods of history when our rights are expanding and fear is decreasing accordingly, visual gestures like hanging a flag can easily morph into empty attempts to raise individual social status or consumer appeal. When used this way, they don’t necessarily signify a value that will be sturdy enough to stand up to real threats and risk. But as rights contract and people feel increasingly afraid and vulnerable, these symbols take on a different role, closer to the role they were originally intended to serve. They become small beacons of care and safety, like the yellow signs of my childhood or a candle in the window or a quilt hung on a clothesline. When these visual promises of care dot our communities, we each grow a little more bold in our willingness to venture out into the world and to care for and take risks for one another. This is particularly true when broadcasting these symbols, even subtly, carries its own risk. Like marks along a trail in the woods, these symbols offer indicators of orientation and safety in an otherwise disorienting environment. This, in turn, protects the small spark of our courage that helps us continue to move forward and continue to look out for each other, knowing we aren’t lost or entirely alone. As the writer, Sandy Allen wrote this week, following last weekend’s protests,
“Emotional, I paused to take a pic of the trans crosswalk there in the rain. I admit in the past when I’ve seen this crosswalk I’ve maybe rolled my eyes or made a joke. But last Saturday it felt like it meant something, this pink and blue paint on asphalt. It means something, all these people who’d taken time out of their Saturdays to protest, despite the weather, some with their kids. It means something, that some people do actually care about my trans humanity.”
Part of the reason the yellow window signs feel like a particularly powerful emblem to me is that I think the degree to which children feel safe and brave in the world is usually an indicator of how well we are doing at taking care of each other more broadly. After all, it wasn’t just the children who relied on the adults behind the yellow signs to be safe and welcoming; it was also their parents, who had to be willing to trust that their children would be cared for by those unknown adults, in order for the system to work. When the interdependence of the community allows everyone to be a little more trusting, we all become a little more willing to take risks, too, and sometimes a willingness to take risks is necessary to truly care for each other, as the stakes of care are raised around us. It wasn’t low crime rates that made us feel safe as young children on city streets in the eighties, it was a high level of community care, despite the crime rates.
Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon can be found in Japan, where children are notoriously independent from a very young age. This early independence isn’t just fostered by placing a high cultural value on children’s autonomy or by a lack of parental “helicoptering,” as is sometimes suggested. Rather, children’s confidence and their parents’ lack of fear are fueled by strong community connections and by physical infrastructure that has been designed to facilitate these values. In an article about this aspect of Japanese culture, researcher, E. Owen Waygood, explains,
“Japanese cities are built on the concept that every neighborhood should function as a village. That planning paradigm means you have shops and small businesses in residential neighborhoods, which means there are places to go—places these kids can walk to.”
The article goes on to note that, “In a survey of 14 countries, Japanese parents were the most likely to agree with the idea that neighborhood adults look out for other people’s children.”
I suspect, if asked, they would also find that the neighborhood adults look out for each other, because the choices that we make that prioritize children tend to make life more humane for the rest of us, too.
It would be easy to attribute this mutual community trust to a more homogeneous culture. In the US, arguments for a return to safer neighborhoods almost always rely on harkening back to a perceived rose-tinted era of the past, one that, in addition to having lower crime, is also usually imagined as extremely white and extremely patriarchal. The problem is that this doesn't actually track with the real demographic history. I grew up in a New York that was significantly less wealthy and significantly more diverse than it is today. Because it was less wealthy, it was also dirtier and there was more crime because there was more desperation. The yellow signs themselves were a community solution to the fact that crime rates peaked in New York during the late eighties and early nineties. So there isn’t an easily sanitized reason for why I felt safe on the city streets as a child during a demonstrably less safe time, other than the fact that I was confident in the network of community care that existed all around me. I knew there were places I could go where people would care about me, and that made it possible to trust myself and to trust that I could be braver than I might otherwise have been.
One of my graduate school mentors, Sal Vascellaro, spoke about this phenomenon in an interview where he described taking children to visit a neighborhood business in New York in the seventies. He said,
“The city was not nearly as safe as it is now, and stories of muggings and drugs just riddled everybody’s lives. And [the children] were learning that there were things in the class they could trust, and that there were people out there in the world that they could truly learn from.”
These are powerful community understandings, not only for children but for all of us.
A hopeful story that emerged last week, among many darker stories, was the rallying of the small town of Sackets Harbor, NY for the release of a local family, including three children, who had been taken into custody by ICE. The family was taken from a local farm to a detention facility in Texas, after agents searched a neighboring house and then went door to door. 1,400 people live in Sackets Harbor, and 1,000 of them, almost the entire town, showed up to demand the family’s release. The principal of the local school noted, “This is a carpool town,” and she explained that she had driven the children to and from tutoring. When the oldest child was finally given access to a phone, after days in custody, the person she called was her teacher. Nearly every member of this community stood up vocally for the children, who were not their own but whom they considered their own, and the family is now being released. This is not how these stories usually end. But when your entire community stands up for you, it matters.
This is the common denominator of the yellow signs in store windows, and the pride flags outside homes, and the children running errands in Japan, and the neighbors in Sackets Harbor—seemingly small gestures of community care accumulate. And when this happens we are all safer and more able to act with courage.
In times of risk and fear, the way we care for each other matters greatly, especially when our care extends beyond those we know most intimately to reach those who could easily be viewed as strangers when they walk into our shops or our classrooms or onto our buses. The practical gestures and symbols that say, “Come inside, you’ll be safe here,” make a difference. They signify that we don’t have to view each other as strangers when we are willing to promise, in public ways—even through something as seemingly small as a sign in a window—that we are committed to each other’s survival. And, as the story about the children of Sackets Harbor makes clear, it is nothing less than survival that’s at stake.
What small thing can you do for someone who doesn’t belong to you to make them feel a little safer? What can you do to extend your network of care and community a little farther?
Wishing you safe havens and the courage to build them for others,
Alicia
A few things I found helpful & hopeful this week…
This is a beautiful essay about public libraries.
"Every time we save a single shelf of books, we are saving the Library of America. And saving the entire Library of America means each of us just have to go out there and save a single shelf of books."It can be hard to be creative when life feels overwhelming. Sometimes it’s just helpful to be reminded of that.
There are many wise writers with beautiful things to say about the importance of books in this video (including Judy Blume toward the end!). But if you only have a few minutes, watch the first five with Jason Reynolds.
If you think someone else in your life might need some hope, please share. It’s always easier to hold onto hope when we’re not doing it alone.
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