I've lived in a big city for years now. Never seen anybody get mugged, or shot, or carjacked, despite doing activist work that often has me visiting poor minority neighborhoods.

The only time I ever really felt uneasy was when I had to walk alone at night through a neighborhood where all the businesses had bars on the windows. Worst thing that happened was a couple of people asking me for money, and they didn't give me any shit when I said I didn't carry cash.

But any time I visit the small town where I grew up there's always someone or another acting like I came back from a fucking warzone lmao

  • mechwarrior2 [he/him]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    One time we were explaining to a relative how a storm had downed some tree branches and they implied that our urban trees were just weaker compared to their country trees lmao

    Smh at the rootless cosmopolitanism of these city trees

    • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      I used to live in an area where trees were planted too close to the curb and street, so 50ish years later the trees got huge and had a very lopsided root system that would knock them straight into the road. Every year a few go down and wreck the overhead powerlines.

      This was firmly a suburb though.

      • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
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        edit-2
        1 year ago

        When my grandma was still around, the family would all go to her gouse for holidays, and she lived in a tiny little town in a redwood forest. Since redwoods are protected here, some of them grow straight up through the road, so it feels like you're walking into this mossy post-apocalyptic land of colossal pavement-breaking trees and banana-sized slugs.

        Man, redwood trees rule

        • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
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          1 year ago

          That sounds really amazing. I love forested areas. I don't know how people look at a bare sky with no trees and go "ah nature".