A six-year-old girl is sitting on the beach, near the waterline, digging a hole with a clamshell. She has been working diligently for about fifteen minutes. Her younger sister, four, saunters over and watches silently. Her foot, slowly and deliberately nearing the edge of the hole, pushes some sand back in. The older sister looks up, starts yelling and tries to hit the younger one with the clamshell in her hand.

In an off-campus apartment shared by four men, three of them are sitting in the living room drinking beer, talking about their absent roommate. They complain that he never cleans up the kitchen or helps in the picking up and cleaning of common areas like the living room and bathroom. As they are talking the fourth roommate, returning from studying at the library (on a Friday night), comes in. He nods to the three others and, without taking off his coat, retreats to his bedroom and closes the door. The other three look at each other, shake their heads and laugh quietly, then turn to a discussion of plans for the upcoming weekend.

In a lower-income neighborhood, residents on a block have organized for a massive cleanup and beautification campaign, sponsored by a local newspaper. They have gone down to the paper and gotten paint, of two colors, to represent their official block colors. Over the next several days they have removed six truckloads of trash from two vacant lots, put out planters all along the block, and painted the curbs.[…]