Saturday, February 17, 2007
Appearance vs. Reality
In these small towns and grassy utopias, the population isn’t necessarily as cookie cutter as the houses. While the residents are predominately upper middle class, they differ in race, age, and family make up. There is no such thing as the nuclear family anymore; rather, you’ll find broken homes, single parent families, and a divorce rate that seems to vastly surpass the marriage rate. Many suburbanites find their weekends occupied with Grande Nonfat Sugarfree Lattes, AYSO soccer games, and a general overexhaustion of the magnetic strip on their credit card as they jump from one shopping center to another. There are children playing in the streets and mothers gossiping with one another, but also an older generation of residents who choose to remain in the homes they’ve raised their families in. While the green landscapes and manicured lawns seem reminiscent of the liveliness of the suburbs, there is also a great deal of death that occurs in these picture perfect neighborhoods. The beauty of the suburbs easily masks the car accident fatalities, despondent suicides, and victims of old age that are taken everyday. As I’m looking out the window at my own neighborhood’s Starbucks watching the SUVs and BMWs drive by on newly refinished streets, I’m trying to remind myself that no one’s life is as perfect nor simple as it may appear from the outside.
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3 comments:
Until I sort this out properly, I'll be publishing as comments.
My words:
1. bored protesters (or, It can't be real syndrome)
2. Crazy old reactionaries
3. sexual abuse
Only a few of these have been in my personal experience. The bored hippies for one. In the suburbs it can seem too good to be true. So many of the inhabitants, having cut their hair and joined the work force will find something wrong and will protest it in various ways. These things are usually small and would only be noticed by someone who felt compelled to notice things. The repainting the food co-op to a horrible olive green got a small picket line going, and the name of the highschool's mascot, The Blue Devils, led to letters to the local newspaper denouncing Satanism. (It was actually refering to WWI flying aces). The Suburbs also can attract people on the political (and psychological) fringes, like the woman who lived down the street of my friend, whose father was in the Klan and whose garage door was covered in graffiti swastikas, anarchy symbols and happy faces. She'd inherited the place from her father, so her being completely crazy wasn't a hindrance.
Finally, sexual abuse. It's amazing how much this has affected many of my friends, and it was something that the suburbs couldn't protect against, some might even argue that the strained repression and conspiracy of silence that the suburbs are sometimes known for made it a perfect target. I don't think that this is unique to the suburbs by any means, people just don't expect it to happen there.
I think what you try and capture here is an important part of the suburbs. Namely, that what is superficial and exterior is not necessarily indicative of the inner workings of the individual suburban experience. Highlighting the stereotypes and then breaking them down is exactly what I think needs to happen. Death was a different and interesting route to take, specifically because we have mostly talked in the class about YOUNG families, couples...children, etc. En los suburbios hay de todo.
This goes along the lines of what i was trying to say about the facade of suburbia. It has turned into a competition to keep up with "the Jones'". But what do all these material posessions mean in the scheme of things. Whats also important to note is that while people may be accumulating possession after possession, this may be a way to occupy themselves from reality, a reality that involves a husband going for a younger thinner woman, and a wife who becomes increasingly disappointed in the emptiness of life. Once again a generalization, but a story that pervades in many lives in elite suburbia.
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