Many people (who are friends and acquaintances) may know that I recently moved to a sub-division far away from everything and everyone I hold dear (like Wal-Mart and the guy that gives us discount fried chicken at Wal-Mart). Even though I live so far out and without a method of personal transportation I love where I live.
Masterson station is very diverse (probably back from the days when it used to be a slave compound) and affluent and makes me feel like I’m living a life of luxury and not a life based off of nine dollars an hour and a fat residual check that I’ll eventually have to pay back. The only downside to living in an area such as this (as I have lived in one before) has been the neighborhood association.
We moved in a few weeks ago and haven’t had the opportunity to acquire a lawnmower to keep our grass in tip top shape (even though it looked terrible when we moved in and the landlord didn’t do crap about it then). So a few weeks go by and our grass looks horrid from weeds and lack of color prompting some clown with the neighborhood association to call our landlord and complain about how our lawn doesn’t look like it was treated with thousands of dollars worth of lawn equipment and chemicals.
One visit from our landlord, eight dollars, and two hours later I’m angry and bitter about the whole ordeal. Instead of knocking on our door and being neighborly and asking us nicely to cut our yard (things people should have learned in kindergarten), they went behind our backs and snitched. Such a punk move prompted me to actually research (complain and eat junk food) the beginnings of the concept of a neighborhood association.
NOTE: None of this may be actual fact, but it is the best theory that several sociological experts have on the subject (several sociological experts = one bitter and angry fat Black man)
Mrs. Deborah Lowance and Mrs. Goldeen Digger were having high tea sitting on the veranda overlooking the field that used to be rich with cotton and subservient Negros. Mrs. Digger decided that while she missed all the colored folk working in her grandfather’s (step grandfather) field she was glad not to have their loud music and promiscuous dancing affecting her sleep at night. Deborah Lowance agreed, but for a different reason. She feared that since slavery was over having Black people in a former slave attitude would bring unwanted suspicion about her family following the law. If people thought her family was a group of law breakers then no one would want to buy any land from them. With no land, and no available capital coming into Mrs. Lowance she would have to pay for her tapeworm candy (to lose weight) by resorting to prostitution and fraternizing with the wrong sorts of male suitors. People would think that she was Irish because of the fraternizing and her property value would severely decrease (because back then Irish people weren’t white…which is a load of crap.) Thus Deborah and Goldeen concocted a plan to make sure that people of color would stay out and they could wield power over controlling who did what on their land. They were the first neighborhood association.
Even though these two bigoted White women started the neighborhood association (mainly because they lacked the mental fortitude or the righteous capital to become feminists and actually do something good for the world), their organization has evolved and changed over the years allowing many different types of people to partake in the douchebaggery (as long as their daughters remained untouched by ethnic hands).
What pisses me off about neighborhood associations is that they don’t do anything productive. They make sure that lawns are mowed a certain way and that unsavory characters don’t drive down property values, but those aren’t productive things, they’re just new forms of classism and true elitism. Most of the time the people running these things aren’t even true property owners (not breadwinners) but the spouses of breadwinners who don’t have anything else better to do than watch the View, eating cheesecake or watch Sportscenter five times in a row, eating cereal out of a mixing bowl while their spouses go out and do productive things like make business deals, teach, defend people in court, save lives in the ER. Having an organization that requires nothing of its members except a hive mentality of douchebaggery (examples: Gangs, the KKK) makes people feel like they are accomplishing something by existing when really they are just sucking at life.
