Straight No Chaser

Eclectic Tidbits, or, Where I Live

one day in the spring of 2002, when i was a junior in high school, a man came to stand out in front of my school, waving a confederate flag. from what i understand, he showed up around seven that morning, and he was there when my dad and i got to the carpool dropoff line, waving the flag and grinning indiotically at passing cars.

the entire school treated it like they would a bomb threat. carpool parents, mine included, locked their doors and drove off, still with their kids in tow. students already inside the building were prohibited from leaving, lest the dixie-guy should feel threatened by our multicolored faces and launch a white-supremacist genocide.

eventually, school security guards escorted him off of the property and warned him not to come back. supposedly he never spoke to either of them, or to anyone else; just kept grinning and waving like a guy with a secret. that day, in three of my seven classes, my classmates and i had to write impromptu essays about the cultural significance of the confederate flag. almost everyone wrote about that guy and how terrifying he was, how disquieting it had been to spot him in the morning, an ignorant intruder on our progressive campus.

when i was little, we lived in a neighborhood consisting of mostly jewish yuppies and their small kids. in the house where we live now, our neighbors on one side are indian immigrants; on the other side, a white guy and his puerto rican wife. it's a doctors-and-lawyers kind of neighborhood, but as multicultural as a large corporation's diversity training video.

it's why i snicker to myself when some standardized test question tells me about "stanley, qi li and tonga" and the party they're all attending. they think they're earning brownie points for that; they are not. at the program i just left, eight of the twelve kids in my class were only second-generation americans. there was not a qi li, but there was a tonga.

on the first day, when we introduced ourselves, i got all choked up when we played the name game and not one child had any trouble pronouncing any other's first name. i felt like i was looking on the face of true progress. but that's probably naive.

there's a suburb not far from mine full of old money couples who could own towering estates in the district or upstate new york, but don't. instead they choose reclusive, ivy-lined family properties; they drive gasoline-efficient and hybrid cars for the environmental considerations; they spend two hours a week training at willow street yoga. after class, they probably go down the street for sauteed tofu and granola parfaits or green tea ice cream, no joke.

if you started at my house and traveled in a straight line, you'd probably have to drive twenty miles before you found ten people who don't think our current president is a racist, boorish, assholic and unintelligent joke of a president. even now, i probably spot, daily, an average of fifteen gore/kerry bumper stickers still faithfully stuck to the backs of cars.

i was raised to believe that sameness is narrow. that diversity is necessary to progress, and that no community can thrive when its ideas only serve to benefit itself. this is not to say that we don't have our prejudices, obviously; just that it's hard to grow up here and not grow up liberal.

there's a downside. the downside is, i involuntarily judge people for not feeling the same way. and i'm always a little--a lot--shocked when i come face to face with what i consider ignorance.

i'm very sensitive to racism. i wonder, frequently, how some people can believe the things they believe.

but then, i can also understand how catastrophes like the gaede twins happen, because people naturally want to pass on the values they know. i can hardly blame republican couples for raising republican children, or tree-hugger couples for raising mini-vegans.

because quite honestly, i can't imagine raising my kids in a place unlike this one.