ROSE NOLEN: Healing our communities is a challenge of the 21st century

I will always be grateful for the fact that I was able to spend part of my childhood in a small town and the other years growing up in the city. I am astonished when I remember how my life was so radically different then than it would be today in either location. In both cases, I lived in neighborhoods where everyone knew everyone else, where kids played in the streets or vacant lots together, where grownups sat on each others' porches in the summer and the milkman left milk on everybody's doorstep.