gentrification

this is what i hate about cities most:

some stupid fuckhead kids try to mug me, and I end up being the one that feels bad.

why? because i’m white, i make enough to be able to walk down the street in a clean shirt and pants and probably enough in my wallet to make it worth their time. because as a world, we provide social approval for quick access to cash more readily than we give it for actual accomplishments or knowledge or ability. because there aren’t enough street lights, and somehow streetlights have become a necessity. because the glorious melting pot harmony of having lots of folks live close together, on top of each other, without expressly acknowledging and addressing differences of culture and class and religion and backgrounds and and and makes us more than willing to not see each other as equals – makes us willing to assume that other people don’t deserve what they have (as though any of us do), didn’t earn it, have no more right to it than we do. because we muddle so much between whether people have a right to what they need, what it means to need versus want, what’s necessary, and whether people have to make an effort to fulfill their own needs, and what happens when we eliminate all the means some people have of making that effort legitimately.

and it goddamn hurts to have someone grab you around the neck and throw you against a car. and it hurts to get punched in the face. and it doesn’t make a single goddamn bit of difference that i regularly do stupid things to myself like play rugby and trip over logs and get wicked poison ivy or get in bike wrecks – it still sucks and it makes me angry and it makes me even angrier that the first thing my brain does is try to justify their behavior, to make it ok, to regularize it, to say i should know better than to walk with my head down, that i’m lucky that some other dude was walking up the street and startled them off before they got my wallet or phone or laptop and that i didn’t end up with a fucked up ribs or a broken face this time and just have a stinging cut on my left elbow and a sore throat.

and i said to sb yesterday that the news in the paper is arbitrary and this is part of what i meant – does the careful collation of special interest pieces and demographically-tailored news briefs foster social engagement? does it provide a “baseline literacy in current culture”? or does it alienate all the people who have not been taught to extrapolate from these arbitrary bits and pieces the legitimate connections to their lives – who have no reason to assume that anybody who arrives in office will be better than the last dude who sucked, or that the million dollar homes listed in the classifieds exist in the same orbit as them, or that 400000 dead in iraq or 2 will change the fact that more of the budget is spent on the military than on schools.

i love the city because it makes me keep my head up, because it makes me painfully aware ofthe breakages in society, because it makes it impossible to ignore and gloss over those things which strike me as glaringly wrong – and i hate it because it makes it so much harder to find some place to start. because it makes even beautiful things seem ugly sometimes, and because there is an inexplicable permeating sadness sometimes here, and because it is so overwhelming that it makes it unconscionably easy to lock out people you have yet to meet.

because sometimes they want to kick your ass and take your lunch money, and how the hell are you supposed to be able to tell the difference?