The "Real" America

Sarah Palin spoke of the “real America”. The Governor while running for vice president, when visiting a rural area said it was good to be in the real America. I believe in all sincerity she sees the real America as the sum of the white and Christian rural parts of the country. A couple of weeks ago I went to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in an industrial urban city and there I saw, what I think is another real America. There were about one hundred people there of many ethnicities, races and socio-economic groups. There were Puerto Ricans and Latinos from Central and South American and Brazilians, some speaking fluent English others Spanish and Portuguese. There were African Americans and more recent arrivals from Africa. There were people of different European ancestries and people from the Middle East and Asia. There were laborers, students and businessmen in suits. Siting there waiting for my turn, Sarah Palin came to mind and I thought that had she been in this room, she would not have acknowledged this as America. I think one of our fundamental divides is between the urban and the rural. Each with different political interests and cultures and I think, like Sarah Palin, we don’t understand or recognize each other. I live in the suburbs, an area that doesn’t quite fit either the urban or rural, pretty much am isolated from both Sarah Palin’s and the America I saw at the Registry. I was fortunate to have had opportunities to live, though most of it in the suburbs, in my early years in very rural areas and my teenage years in a city. I first became conscious of this divide when I took a train from San Jose to San Francisco fifteen years ago, sharing it with a large variety of people. Based on that refreshing experience, more recently, when I had to go on business to San Francisco, I decided to fly into Oakland and instead of hiring a car, I took a bus to the train station and then a train across the Bay. Though brief, the exposure to the variety of races, ethnicities and cultures was enlightening. I propose that we all take an opportunity to spend time in an environment with people we are not accustomed to being around. Furthermore, when evaluating a politician running for an office where they will represent a diverse group, we should look at their record of time spent with the range of their future constituencies. Whatever you may think about our current president Barak Obama, he would have an impressive record on this dimension having been brought up by grandparents in the rural Midwest, spending time in Hawaii and Indonesia and working in the inner Chicago city. I find it interesting that people on the extreme right make fun of his work as a “community organizer” in the inner city. Better he should have been insulated in the real (business) world. Spending time with different people allows us to recognize their humanity on a more visceral level and become empathetic with their wants and fears. Not having had the firsthand experience, we tend to use our imaginations, with liberals exaggerating the plight and conservatives the lack of dignity. At the start of the first war with Iraq, I went to India on business for a few days. As I was accustomed, I went for an early morning walk and came across a group of squatters (I think they were “Untouchables”) living in shacks on the grounds of what appeared to be a government building of some sort. As I walked past, I saw two young people (I don’t recall if they were two men or a man and woman) squatting on the sidewalk, brushing their teeth and spitting the rinsing water into the gutter. My first reaction was to feel sorry for them, seeing the conditions they lived in. But as I approached them, they were talking and laughing with such gusto that I became jealous of them. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed so heartily.