By Tony Sokol
I love the city. I moved to the suburbs and I call them a borough. I vacation in cities. I like the concrete. It feels clean. It feels like home. It annoys me when people put down the city as too dirty or too crowded or too crime-ridden, rude and loud. It pains me to hear the denigration of urban living and metropolitan values, especially when it comes from people whose contact with the city is limited to what they see on TV, read on the internet or hear from a pulpit or a pundit. People who are sheltered from the world we inhabit (as if we lived in a habitrail or an ant farm). People who are sheltered from people who are different from themselves. People who are sheltered from ideas that are different from theirs. People who need people. I like living around people. All kinds of people, in all kinds of clothes. I’m accustomed to variety. Racial variety. Religious variety. Political variety. Altvariety. It flavors my world. It expands my world view. It keeps the conversations lively.
There is a very strong anti-urban leaning in national politics. Politicians chase after rural dwelling voters because they appear to live in somewhat secluded areas and are categorized as clinging to more traditional values because their isolation shields them from evolving issues that city dwellers face daily. The middle states shape the political landscape because they control the Electoral College by virtue of land mass rather than population. To court provincial voting blocs, conservative politicians demonize urban voters. They say we’re out of touch with their reality because we live in money-squandering, pill-popping, fame-worshipping, hedonistic, orgiastic sin cities, where anything goes and hell be damned. A) That’s not particularly true. And two: what’s wrong with that and where did you say these orgies are? Rural residents who know only what they are told about urban living should be shown cosmopolitan reality before they make up their minds to condemn us. They would see that we’re not that different.
The sense of community in urban areas is not that different than in less populated areas, but politicians treat rural dwellers as if they have more to offer in terms of communities, as if their sense of community is somehow more relevant and fundamental than the fellowships formed in cities. People in rural areas interact with less people on a daily basis. This isn’t a cheap shot at the loneliness of cornfed, intermarried hillbilly obstructionists, it is basic mathematics. They may know their neighbors very well, but they have fewer of them, and those few offer little diversity of opinion because they share a common background that has been honed by generations of homogenous conformity. Ideas become sedentary when there’s nothing to mix it up. Still waters run deep. Traditionalists fear change and resent those who would bring it on. As an urbanite, I believe people in the middle states would have more of a sense of community if they were just a little more crowded. They would embrace change as progress instead of social deterioration and debate issues from different angles if there were more people around. Let’s bring it to them. Let them meet the people who scare them. They shouldn’t be shy. New Yorkers aren’t known to be shy. We might not be in the fucking mood, but we’re not shy. We’ve grown accustomed to each other. On the subway, we don’t look twice at pink hair, fangs, turbans, hoodies, or full-on drag. These are our neighbors, the people we steal cable from. Conservatives who live in the city see the same sights. They don’t become unhinged. They are familiar and no longer see the threat they saw when they first encountered the brightly colored masses. These are the people they may see on the trading floor, editing the company newsletter, fixing a sink or delivering their 420 at lunch.
We should urbanize America. Expand and diversify the people in the middle states. Liberals and progressives should move inland. Immigrants should venture past the urban sprawl of their points of entry. Inner-city families should pool their resources and find cheap land with the clean air that they’ve only seen on a farm on TV. We should develop land and housing to accommodate a growing population that can bring change to static ideas and under-developed backwoods and remote wastelands. We can make “middle-of-nowheres” into “centers-of-somewhere.” Where you see subsidized farmland, I see projects, some office buildings, a corner pharmacy, a bodega, a strip club and a commuter train or light rail. Where you see rocky terrain, I see concrete, tenements, trucking docks, delis, social clubs, a fashion district, a basketball court, a red light district and hot dog stands day and night and a kid selling dime bags. Where you might see long stretches of abandoned cars, trucks and couches along a highway that only sees three cars a week, see a graffiti-embellished skateboard rink, a health clinic and a factory park that becomes a tranny whore hangout after dark. There should be a seedy section in any community so people have some outlet for the desires they can’t quench when they are plowing the fields or taking care of the livestock. Same sex marriages are frowned upon but animal husbandry is encouraged. They’re out in the fields for days at a time without human contact and, hey, that sheep over there has a nice ass. Rurals might like a little kink out in the open, I’m not saying it’ll save one goat-raping but if it does, so be it.
A Country naturalists say city living is unhealthy, but according to the city’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, babies born in New York City in 2009 will live more than two years longer than the national average. Evangelical purveyors of etiquette say New Yorkers are selfish, but New Yorkers top many charitable donation lists. Polite red-staters say New Yorkers are rude and insensitive. Fuck them. Bible Belt representatives are afraid that their residents may be seduced by the Sodom-and-Gomorrah-life lived by such hedonists and criminals as those found in the ultra-nice Minneapolitans and St. Paulites of the Twin Cities. They bludgeon congregations and with frightening statistics that prove that 97% of crime in the United States is committed in cities, which only have half the population of the country. Lawmakers roll out studies like one from a few years ago that found that all but three of 268 boys in the Kansas State Reform School came from cities. They say that someone is killed in New York City every thirty-six hours. (Which reminds me, it’s my turn and I only have an hour left.)
I am afraid to live in a country where decisions are made by a rural voting bloc. They don’t represent me. They don’t even like me. I’ve seen websites where they encourage people to kill me and people like me. They put red and white targets on images of people who don’t agree with them so they can hunt them down and shoot them on the floors of congress. They equate cities with progressives and liberals, as if it were that easy, and they have no real idea what progressives and liberals want because they have no contact with them and have no interest in what they have to say. Liberals and progressives are usually well-versed in conservative thought because conservative has come to mean holding on to the past, which means we’ve already passed it. It’s already the foundation of most of what we know. We were raised in a world that had a history. A history we don’t particularly wish repeated, but that traditionalists in central states run over and over like a loop of old news footage in an abandoned movie house. We think they’re out of touch with other people and they think we’re out of touch with reality. Social progress in city areas is being hindered by the misinformed populace of the more sparsely populated areas. We would have recognized same-sex marriage, legalized medical marijuana, probably decriminalized recreational marijuana. Civil rights would have been passed much faster. Stem cell research may already be saving lives. We would be greener, less reliant on polluting energies. We wouldn’t be so quick to go to war.
Urbanize America. Build more cities. Bring industry to an outsourced nation. Unions should get behind this because, at their heart, they want to build. It creates more than jobs. Unions feed on accomplishment. It keeps them strong. Like their workers. New York City has one of the greatest labor workforces in the United States. They’ve done a great job. The supposedly Mafia-lead construction union built Manhattan into one of the greenest places in the country. Manhattan and other cities make the most ecological use of land mass. Apartment buildings are more efficient to heat and cool. A New Yorker’s carbon footprint is 30 percent smaller than the average American’s. The rate of car ownership is among the lowest in the country; 65 percent of the population walks, bikes, or rides mass transit, which emits less atmospheric carbon than trains, planes, and automobiles, to work. Supermarkets, drug stores, laundromats and nightclubs are within walking distance. Don’t just fix the bridges. Give rurals somewhere to go. Give them something to do. It will bring industry and a taste of urban living to the rural population.
Politicians pander to rural communities because people there can be separated by acres, sometimes miles and they don’t have the frame of reference in more populated communities. Farmers and other people in the all-important rural Midwest can go days without seeing other people, especially any people who might seem alien to them. They’re stuck in their social outreach to the few people they encounter and Fox News. Conservative politicians and pundits monger fear, especially after the world trade center attacks. (Those attacks happened in a city, but cities had to split national security defense monies with areas that were not targets and who didn’t like us in the first place. Some of them said we brought it on ourselves with our sinful ways.) They don’t want to be associated with us and the way we’ve progressed. They don’t want us to share our transgressions to turn them into the deviants they are convinced we’re becoming. They see where they think we’re going and they don’t like it.
The only reason they don’t like it is because they’ve never tried it.
(The Article Was Originally Appeared on The Chiseler)
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