Gone Suburban

In the words (as close as I can recall) of that venerable if short-lived TV series "My So-Called Life:"

"People are always asking how school was today. It's like asking 'How was that drive-by shooting today?' You don't ask how it _was_; you're lucky to get out alive."

Today's _Suburban Life_ announced that area high schools will be instituting new security measures, in the wake of Columbine, 9/11, and funding. (Funding rarely seems to follow quickly in the wake of events--just ask the people who run homeless shelters these days). Schools will now boast off-duty police officers (both uniformed and plainclothes), drug-sniffing dogs, locked doors, lockdowns (in which the whole school is held in place and the drug-sniffing dogs are released), color-coded ID cards that tell what floors a student is entitled to be on at any given time, and, in some cases, metal detectors (some signs left that this is the 'burbs and not the ghetto, I guess).

Plusses listed in the article: increased security, safety, and control.
Minuses listed in article: cost.

The reporter apparently felt it unnecessary, or unimportant, to consider other possible points of view. Color-coded IDs?!? Telling students they can only be in designated places at designated times, and enforcing this not merely with a few announcements at the start of the semester, but with a digitally-equipped ID-checking system? It sounds like prison, except, of course, that prison is a lot worse.

I was fearful for most of my years in high school. _Terrified_ would be a good description of my primary attitude at school, when not bored out of my mind. But the threats I feared were internal, not external. I was terrified of the attendance office. Because my mother worked for a living (God forbid), she had a tendency to forget to call the attendance office when I had a doctor's appointment or something. I was (it seemed to me, though in retrospect it was perhaps not that often) continually getting called down to explain my unexcused absences. I was so frightened of this that I would generally come back immediately from any appointment, even if my excused absence lasted several more hours. I was terrified of not having my homework done properly (except in English, where I held a contest freshman year to see who could write his paper closest to the time of class--I beat the boys [hence the "his"] the day I got full credit for an essay I'd written in algebra class, the period before English).

But mostly I was terrified of my fellow students. I was terrified because my freshman year, a girl had been Saran-wrapped naked to a tree by a group of her "friends." I was terrified because people always seemed to be disappearing, rumor had it to rehab. I was terrified because the president of Students Against Drunk Driving carried a case of beer around in his car, and boasted about it. I was terrified because I was against the Gulf War (the "first" Gulf War) and most people were at least nominally for it, and some of them were virulently for it. I was terrified because grown-ups had so little understanding of the real prevelance of drugs and violence, and because their actions to prevent it, like those of the suburbs here, were so wrong-headed. I was terrified, in short, because I felt I was living in _1984_. Students here, it seems, now actually will be.

Today I read in the New York Times magazine (from last year) about the year in ideas (again, that would be last year in ideas--we're a little out of date in this household) that S-M-L (not to mention XS and XL) as sizes were going out of style. Tailored clothing is the way to go. According to the author of this little blurb, tailored clothing was once considered unAmerican (after all, who has time to get his suit fitted properly when waging a war to protect his precious bodily fluids from Communist infiltration?) But I guess the war on terror requires a more tailored look--guess it must help when hob-nobbing (uh, excuse me, negotiating) with all those oil barons.

Because we're so behind the times here in the house that the S-M-L revolution forgot, I am only now just getting around to reading the most recent Harry Potter book. In the bit I just read, they're trying to clean out a house:

"Snape might refer to their work as 'cleaning,' but in Harry's opinion they were really waging war on the house, which was putting up a very good fight, aided and abetted by Kreacher. The house-elf ekpt appearing wherever they were congregated, his muttering becoming more and more offensive as he attempted to remove anything he could from the rubbish sacks."

This sounds so exactly like my family's attempts to deal with this house, in which the majority of my family plays the role of Harry & Co., and my grandmother plays the role of Kreacher. Ostensibly, my purpose here is to create order out of chaos (an honorable occupation, since I have no marketable skills and the economy sucks anyway). In theory, this would mean that vast quantities of things (slides of the Grand Canyon, more slides of the Grand Canyon, and several thousand other slides of similar things; pieces of things that no longer exist or are broken or generally unidentifiable, dusting and ripped garmet bags, business cards from several decades ago, tail ends of wallpaper that is no longer manufactured and no longer in the house, cords missing appliances and small appliances missing cords. . .). In practice, it means that I mostly move these things (after dusting both the thing and the space) from one place to another, under intense supervision. Occasionally, I am able to sneak something into the trash, but there is always the danger that I'll be asked to retrieve it. Today I managed to throw away some cracked leather shoes (white low-heeled sandals, actually, although they were no longer exactly white) and some broken crayons. I was rather sad about the crayons, as they were old Crayola crayons, with the colors that aren't made anymore. But one must be ruthless in this business, or one never gets anywhere.

Blogger, the folks who supply the stuff that makes it possible for me to write these things and then have them appear on a website, have a slogan: "Push-Button Publishing for the People." It's a slogan of the sort I'm inclined to like--a 'zine published in my old home town always said it was "Free for the People." (To give fair mention, it's called The Garlic Press (http://www.garlicpress.org/). I take no responsiblity for anything they do (or don't) say).

Of course, judging any enterprise positively because it says it's "For the People" is undoubtedly a dangerous exercise, but one I think about a fair amount, especially these days.

You see, I don't know who the People are out here in the 'burbs. This is one of those places that doesn't have poor people--or rather, it may, but you don't see them. Or you do see them, but you don't recognize them as poor. I just read that 30 million Americans work low-paid jobs--defined as $8.70/hour or less. That works out to around $18,000/year, the poverty line for a family of four. (I made nearly $17,000 in my last year as a graduate teaching assistant and complained of poverty. Those grad students who also have families are legitimately poor, but a lot of us are just whiners). The last staggering statistic in this article (which, if you want to look it up, is called "Four myths, 30 million potential votes," by Beth Shulman, published in the Alameda Times-Star, August 24, 2003) is that those 30 million low-wage earners represent one out of every four American workers. Yikes.

But you get the picture. Enough for now.

This morning I bought vacuum cleaner bags from the hardware store and summer sausage, eggs, lettuce, apples, tomatoes, and something else I can't remember from the grocery store, all without laying out a dime. How, you ask?

"Charge it, please!"

The suburbs hardly compare to the Plaza, where Eloise so famously got to order up for room service and "charge it please!" every few pages, but you can actually hold charge accounts around here. It amazes me. At the hardware store, large numbers of my extended family are listed on my grandmother's charge account. We could all being going wild with spray paint and she'd never even know (until she got the bill, of course). At the little grocery, not only can you charge things, but it's often very difficult to keep them from carrying your groceries to your car for you. There's nothing more embarrassing, to my mind, than being young and able bodied and having a gangly teenaged boy carry a bag with croissants and spinach in it the five feet from the door to my car, as if I couldn't manage it myself. Really, I ought to learn to live it up--training to be a suburban matron, or soccor mom, as they are called these days.

Today I went to Utah. Or rather, my friend thought I had gone to Utah (based on a garbled message) and was surprised when I called her back so quickly. Actually, I went to a meeting of the Illinois Task Force for Utah Wilderness, which sounds a lot like a student organization back when I was in grad school that called itself the Iowa Society for Virginia People. They seemed to be very good at getting money out of the coffers of the student goverment and various other bureaucratic entities at the school, although so far as I know their function was purely social. If you could combine the financial finesse of those Iowa/Viriginia people with the serious cause of these Illinois/Utah people, you really might have something going.

As it was, I spent an hour in a room with a dozen or so octogenerians (plus a few token middle-aged folk) and listened to a somewhat younger man explain the inner workings of RS 2477 and FLPMA 202 and 603 and other arcane bits of environmental legislation. Then he very carefully explained what we all ought to do in order to prevent terrible things from happening. Mostly this involved calling and leaving messages on Congressional voicemail numbers. There was some discussion of the merits of calling vs. e-mailing and faxing vs. letter-writing. Calls and hand-written faxes seemed to carry the day. All in all, it was sort of like a paint-by-numbers kit for activism. In the suburbs, even the impending destruction of wilderness is presented in a soothing fasion, in the rented meeting room of a greenhouse/conservatory.

I used to live in a city, but I've gone suburban. That's what I tell everyone, anyway--it lends a hipster sound to an otherwise bald and dreary situation. Or I tell people, "This is what the new economy hath wrought," although this is an incorrect assertion, as I had no part in the new ecomony, except as a minor consumer--a book or two from Amazon, an ISP, e-mail, a new computer from time to time.

No, my being here is no fault but my own.

But as long as I'm here, let's look around.

The other day, as it was sweltering in the house (this is suburbia, but our house has only downstairs window air-conditioners, and I work upstairs), I went to the proverbial coffee shop, with my computer and a book and a notebook, to sip iced mocha and look studious and deep, or at any rate as deep as it is possible to look while drinking coffee-enhanced chocolate milk from a carefully logo-imprinted cup. (Not very, I think). The proverbial coffee shop had three sets of clientele: moms, there to pick up beans and a drink to go; teenagers, there to speak teenager-ese and play with their straws, and schizophrenic men, who sat outside, where they could smoke (and where, I suppose, people found them less objectionable). The schizophrenic men were something of a topic for the teenagers, who of course deemed them "creepy."

Of course, my diagnosas of the men with schizophrenia may be wrong. They may just be bums--although nowadays, that is often much the same thing. A third of the homeless population is said to be mentally ill (I'm not clear if this is an estimate or some more elaborate kind of census count--a subject to research, no doubt), frequently with schizophrenia. Once they kept them in institutions; now they keep them on the streets.

These men, I suspect, are only marginally homeless; they are the sort medical students giving histories would term as "middle aged-man of no fixed address." They slouch, they smoke, they read folded up newspapers and make cryptic notes. They could be graduate students--some probably once were--except that they have slipped; their appearance is a few notches below even grad student grubby. They are there every day, doing the same thing, watching. Of course teenagers find them creepy. I find them reassuring: reassuring in the way of a dive bar or a truckstop restaurant. There is still a place that you can go, they say. Maybe next time I'll sit outside with them.