Solomon Jones: Divided we fall, together we fix

I'VE LIVED in Philadelphia all my life, and I can say with reasonable certainty that the solutions to our city's social ills can't be found in academic studies.

Try as they might, researchers will never right our ship using phone surveys or focus groups. They won't find answers in science labs. Nor will social answers come through social media.

There's only one way for us to find the solutions to our social problems, and that is to socialize. I don't mean fake socializing, either. Manufactured celebration leads only to manufactured smiles, and, to be honest, we've got too much of that already.

Take Christmas, for instance. It's a perfectly good religious celebration. You want to exchange reasonably priced gifts? Cool. You want to talk about the religious significance? Fine. But if you don't say stuff like, "God rest ye merry gentlemen" any other time, please don't speak old English to me on Christmas. You should also refrain from asking me for figgy pudding. I have no idea what it is, and frankly, neither do you.

Bottom line: I prefer real talk, and that's possible only when people take the opportunity not only to celebrate, but also to be themselves while doing so.

I came to that realization this past weekend, when we had our first block party. Block parties, you see, are a Philadelphia tradition, and they are the closest thing we have to a social barometer.

Nobody gets dressed up for a block party. Nor do block parties involve going into debt while buying expensive gifts for people we don't even like. Block parties, in fact, are the one occasion where people can let their hair down and be who they really are.

And why not? You're in front of your own home. If you choose to get tipsy, and suffer third-degree burns while trying to grill frankfurters on a hot plate, that's your business, because that's your house. If you decide to make the Electric Slide more interesting by dancing on wet plastic with a live wire in your teeth, you might end up as a crispy critter, but at least you'll have fun doing so.

Of course, block parties aren't always enjoyable. There is a dark side, and the ugliness is wide ranging: Neighbors fighting in July over a parking space beef from December. Children settling scores from the third-grade hopscotch contest. Elderly people refighting a war from 1942.

Fortunately, our block party wasn't like that, primarily because my wife, LaVeta, was in charge. Working with a committee of neighbors, she oversaw the implementation of dues to allow us to pay for the block party. She anticipated that someone might have one beer too many, and drafted a committee of men from the block for security. And just in case things got out of hand on the various amusements, she scheduled neighbor volunteers to watch the children.

In between, people grilled, and there were no fires. But just in case, we had the fire department bring a truck toward the end of the evening. We told them it was so kids could play with the fire equipment, but really it was about overzealous grillers.

By the end of the night, we all felt a little closer to our neighbors. We had come together as a group, implemented a plan and carried it out as one. We socialized. We talked to each other. We looked out for each other's children.

In doing so, we learned that we had far more in common than the place we live - the thing we have in common is the way we live: together. If 30 households can come together to host a party, then 300 households can come together to fix a school or address violence or plan a future.

Together. It's how people have always fixed things, and it's the only way we can fix things now.