Having lived in Southern California for decades, I'm not only
Posted: Nov 20, 2012
but I miss it and find the more insular, mostly white Christian town I live in now sadly lacking in important ways.
My society in L.A. was mostly white, mostly born and raised there, but with plenty of variety, like our Japanese-American neighbors, the black guy in the next office with a passion for French antiques, a Turkish friend whose wistful descripions of the farm she grew up on sound like a little paradise, the accountant who's probably gay, a Yemeni-American manager with a terrific sense of humor, glancing out the window and seeing a woman swaying gracefully down a street lined with highrise office buildings with a basket of laundry on her head, etc., etc., etc. Most of those raised overseas conversant in several languages, not just two.
Normal, nice, part of daily life. Enriching. In L.A. I was part of a big wide and mostly unscary world of fascinating people.
I live in a smallish southern town now. There's a lot to like, of course, but the fact is that conversations are constricted from too few viewpoints, too much agreement (too much is definitely a problem, I've found), the lack of understanding of many things that are well known in less insular environments, too many subjects that turn unexpectedly too delicate to pursue and have to be shut down. Did I say a very few acceptable viewpoints circulating around and around and around until it's as if they were carved in stone? The world is "out there," weird and potentially dangerous, and usually figures in conversations only to discuss what is wrong with it and "them" or what we need to do to protect ourselves from its threats.
Below is an article reflecting some of the angst of some people in mostly Anglo-white communities who are seeing the continuation what has always been our multicultural nation as evidence that our country is being destroyed. Just like Americans a century and two centuries ago when the (insert name of immigrant group here, English, Bengian, Chinese, German, whatever) moved in, or just too close.
I just wish I could give them some of the experience of just living among people who are different in a variety of good ways. The comfort of knowing for themselves that the others are just regular people too, and the satisfaction of being able to value the differences as assets to all of us.
In Wyoming, Conservatives Feeling Left Behind
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — By now, voters here are over the initial shock. The ranchers, businessmen and farmers across this deep-red state who knew, just knew that Americans would never re-elect a liberal tax-and-spender president have grudgingly accepted the reality that voters did just that.
But since the election, a blanket of baffled worry has descended on conservatives here like early snow across the plains, deepening a sense that traditional, rural and overwhelmingly white states in the center of the country are losing touch with an increasingly diverse and urban American electorate.
“It’s a fundamental shift,” said Khale Lenhart, 27, a lawyer here. “It’s a mind-set change — that government is here to take care of me.”
(Now, see--if they had friends with other viewpoints to talk to, instead of sharing the same opinions back and forth, they'd still be conservative and might still disapprove, but at least they'd be forced to remember that its government is actually one of the more effective tools a citizenry can use to take care of itself--if it chooses. Again, with a more informed and thus less negative viewpoint, they'd be less worried and anxious.)
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