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Attack of the Dishes
I was walking through an alley near our apartment and off the back of an apartment complex that as far as I can tell has maybe 12-15 units, I found the satellite dishes above. There are seven of them here on this corner of the building and another 5 or so on the other corner. So there is nearly one dish for each unit in the building.
Now besides being an eye sore and resembling something out of a sci-fi movie where machines take over the universe by latching on to buildings and then multiplying, these dishes represent for me a microcosm of suburban living, a lifestyle that I am very accustomed to after having spent the last 30 years living in the suburbs of the Los Angeles metro area.
Let me pause a second and mention a book by Eric Jacobsen called “Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith” In the winter quarter of 07 I took a class at Fuller called Theology and Culture and Eric Jacobsen was a guest lecturer for one of the class periods. He talked for about 45 min about city planning, suburban development, car culture, and many other topics that had become so ingrained in my daily life that they had worked their way into my subconscious and remained largely unnoticed. He then led us on a walking tour of Pasadena (in the rain!) and I was enraptured the entire time. It remains one of my favorite class periods in my almost four years at Fuller. That lecture put words and concepts to some of the dis-ease I had felt as it relates to the spirituality (or lack thereof) in the suburbs.
I can’t hope to summarize the lecture or the book in a blog post, but the picture above can serve as an introduction to the topic and if you are interested in the subject, I would recommend the book to you. The many satellite dishes above represent for me the disconnected nature of suburban neighborhoods. Southern California as it is in its current developed state was based around the car. It is common for suburbanites to spend their entire days under roof, going from their house, to their garage, to their car, to their employers garage or parking lot, to their office and then reverse on the way home, maybe making several stops along the way home to do their daily chores (post office, cleaners, groceries etc.). Any suburbanite who has been without their car for an extended period of time knows just how unfriendly the suburbs can be to a pedestrian.
Similarly, homes designed after the rise of the automobile often feature the garage door much closer to the sidewalk (which represents the public, communal property) than the front door, which is often separated from the public space by a large yard and sometimes a gate. One of the principles of Suburbia by its very nature and design is privacy and personal ownership, which has resulted in our becoming disconnected with our neighbors and community around us.
So what do you do when you don’t know your neighbors, when your social group is spread out across several disparate suburbs, and when by design your neighborhood has no communal space because nobody would stop their car long enough to enjoy it? Well you put a dish on your house and watch TV. A lot of it.
Let us rise up against the machines!
Before checking out the book I mentioned you may want to read this wikipedia article on New Urbanism as a primer to the subject.
