Culture & Class Ponderings

There's a full moon out there. It coincides with some kind of vibrational crux over the past week or so. I don't understand these things very well, and I have done no actual astrological research to support my hypothesis, but I'd bet there's some sort of pinnacle moment happening, a heightening of tension, a blowing open of metaphorical doors. Everyone I talk to seems to be reaching high points or low points, breaking points or breakthroughs. It's intense out there. I'm swimming in so much meaty stuff, it seems - I wouldn't say it's overwhelming, because it's not bad like that, really, mostly it's good. But, it's definitely more than I can assimilate, it's coming fast, and I know I'm only scraping at the surface of it as I try to sort it out.

One topic that keeps coming up is a particular sort of class/culture conversation, which I had first with my Mom, then with my brother (who is on tour with his band and experiencing a little slice of heavy metal hipster life in every major or semi-major American town) and then I saw it again on Pensees.

So my current cycle of thinking on this topic started when my Mamala was visiting from NY a couple weeks ago, and sitting outside the Whole Foods Market on a sunny day, she looked around and commented on how in this age of national (and international) corporate preeminence, in this age of McD's and Starbucks and CNN and Wal-Mart, how shockingly similar every place is to every other place. And I looked around, took in the healthy, earthy, progressive, well-off, well-educated, mostly white yuppie splendour that is my favorite place to buy food, and I thought - you know, these people probably look more like Whole Foods shoppers in San Francisco than they look like the Food Lion shoppers on MLK Blvd on the other side of Raleigh. Shopping here is something privileged people do. People who have enough money to pay the premium, who have the time and the gas money to drive up here for something as basic as milk and eggs, who have the time to read up on the benefits of eating organic or taking vitamins. People look healthy here, because they're eating well, and because people who have the time and money to invest in organic foods and vitamins usually also have the time and money to invest in gym memberships, outdoor athletic gear, and vacations. Healthy, relatively wealthy people.

A couple weeks ago, I walked my dog about a block East of where we usually go. That put me in the strange middle strip between my neighborhood, Historic Boylan Heights, and a more industrial type neighborhood with RR tracks and highway exchanges. In between the two is this weird strip of less "desirable" homes. You'd think that two blocks away from my front door, two blocks from where my dog and I laze about on the porch, where I sometimes forget to lock my front door and leave ground floor windows open and unlocked, you'd think two blocks away I'd still feel at ease, still feel like I was in my own neighborhood. But I didn't, boy. I tensed up. I tried to ignore my tension. But I didn't linger long.

The last time I went walking around that area was several months ago, I had needed eggs for a baking project, and gotten in my car with the intent of driving up to Peace Street Market or Cameron Village. Then I realized, wait, there's a corner store two blocks from my house, there's really no justification for driving anywhere for eggs. So in broad daylight, I strolled the two blocks. A group of men were standing around outside the store, drinking, and kinda ogled me as I walked by. The convenience store clerk, a round-bellied middle aged man, looked surprised to see me. There was one lonely carton of eggs, which I bought and then headed out. On my way back past the drinking guys, one started talking to me, smelled like alcohol, asked me for money, got a little too close to my person and made me nervous. I wished him a good rest of the day, and walked on. Someone muttered something mildly obscene as I walked by the rest of the men. I pretended not to hear. I haven't been back to that convenience store since, though I drive by it all the time - in the morning on the way to work, I drive by sometimes and see day laborers standing around with paper cups of coffee. At night, sometimes I see shiny cars with booming sub woofers and spinning rims. I wouldn't walk there again without my dog or a threatening-looking man friend. Even in the daylight.

Now, for someone who'd lived in rural China for a year, mostly alone, the only white gal in a small city, standing head and shoulders taller than most other females around, with boob and ass porportions comparable only to the old or obese, speaking paltry little of any of the local languages, and that with a heavy "foreign"accent, you'd think I could handle two blocks away from my front door. I got called "Lao Wai" constantly. People would come up to me and ask awfully personal things, just because I stood out. People stared and stared. I stared back. You'd think I wouldn't be so easily intimidated by a little staring, that I'd care a little less about standing out, but you'd be wrong.

What is this? What the hell is going on?? Why is my neighborhood so disjointed? Why does it make me so uncomfortable to venture even two blocks out of my usual travel circuits? In the age of information and corporate conformity, I am more culturally similar to other young-ish, plugged in, well-educated, progressive people around the globe than I am to working class people who live a couple blocks away, or for that matter to the vapid, hoochie people who populate the sports bars Glenwood South. And I, the great-grandchild of immigrant dressmakers, making a modest non-profit salary, struggling to pay off this winter's ridiculous gas bills, I am privileged enough to choose which neighborhoods I walk through, to choose healthy food and recycled unbleached toilet paper and microbrew beers. It's been the same everywhere I've lived. My mostly white well-off suburban hometown bordered with mostly black and immigrant Spring Valley. I was geographically closer to lots of restaurants and stores and things in Spring Valley, but never went there. Palo Alto, CA, the capital of nerdy yuppie Silicon Valley, lies across the highway from East Palo Alto, a small city that had no high school at the time, had lots of bars on windows, and which had the highest murder rate per capita in the country in 1996. I used to bike to EPA for work, past all the mansions and ChemLawns on University Avenue, over the highway, and into what seemed like a different universe entirely.

Rich neighborhoods are made possible by the relative invisibility of poor neighborhoods next door. Those day laborers on South Street in Raleigh are working on construction sites and putting in gardens around new overpriced condos and fancy office parks in Raleigh. All the Mexicans and African Americans who cleaned dorms and served food and planted flower beds at Stanford lived in East Palo Alto - the University didn't pay them enough to afford housing closer to campus. It sent idealistic students over to EPA to mentor & tutor kids in various community service programs, even as it was made rich and successful off their relative lack of education and privilege.

Man, ok, I'm about to go off the deep end into a conversation about the military and the federal budget and the grossly exploitive nature of free market capitalism, but I gotta quit for now. This is your favorite ambivalent yuppie communist hypocrite progressive next door, signing off.