Eye Level Pasadena

There’s a special section called To stop the killing over at the Pasadena Star-News website with links to stories about the recent gang violence in our community, video footage from the march earlier this month, and letters from residents about what should be done. The Star-News invites us to participate in the conversation:

“E-mail your hopes and fears — and your best suggestions…. Your comments will be posted on our Web site in the effort to bring peace and reconciliation to the community.” (link)

Cross-posted at Pasadena Conversations.

The Center for Nonviolent Communication over in La Crescenta has a list of human needs up on their website. The list includes physical well-being needs like shelter, safety and food, but it goes way beyond that to include connection needs (acceptance, inclusion, community, belonging, support, to understand and be understood, respect), meaning needs (creativity, challenge, self-expression, to matter), and several other kinds of needs.

My dream for Pasadena is to see it grow into the kind of well-rounded city where we consciously prioritize having everyone here be able to get all of their human needs met. Some of us might be rich in shelter and food and poor in creativity or community or closeness. (Not that those two areas of wealth and need necessarily go hand in hand.) Some of us might have a hard time getting our shelter needs or transportation needs met, but might easily be getting many of the other needs on the list met.

I’d love to see everyone who works here be able to afford to live here, and for everyone who lives here be able to find meaningful work here. Beyond that, I want more resources for meeting other humans needs — like our needs for connection, beauty, leisure, play, cooperation, understanding and being understood — to be more plentiful and easily available. I want these resources to be not just inside places that are selling something or charging admission or that involve being a part of a specific religion. Having museums and coffee shops and businesses and places of worship are all very important and good, but I want to see resources for meeting human needs also easily available for free and in public. I want more parks, more public space hangouts, more public art, more gardens with free admission, more free community events, more friendship catalyzing, conversation catalyzing and laughter catalyzing public events, more free classes about parenting and communication and conflict resolution and creativity.

I’m not necessarily saying the city government is the place all of this should be coming from. It’s just something I crave for this city. It’s something I want to be part of and something I want to work on.

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Center for Nonviolent Communication official website: http://www.cnvc.org/