An octogenarian drops out
I’ve stopped getting upset over daily accounts of wars and catastrophes, shootings, corporate shenanigans, Congressional follies, and the Legislature’s wrangling. Using a 60’s term, “I’m beat down to my socks.”
I missed the 60’s wave of dropouts inspired by the writings of poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist Jack Kerouac and others. Beatniks protested the oppression of minorities, McCarthyism’s witch hunts, the Viet Nam War, and Victorian sexual mores.
They also protested the post WWII rush to consumption. Peace brought a welcome end to the rationing of sugar, gasoline, meat and butter, and shortages of other consumer items like bananas.
New cars, radios and televisions and other gadgets gradually became available again. I remember kids and adults lining up to gawk at Fords and Chevys being unloaded from trucks in Richmond. They couldn’t be built fast enough to satisfy demand.
Keeping up with the Joneses became a craze. In 1952 real-estate developer Wm. Levitt added a new dimension to the fever when he broke ground on Levittown, a city of 50,000 built on farm land outside Philadelphia. Fifteen other cities lay within twenty miles.
All homes had a yard, were moderately priced with low down payments, and came in six different models with catchy names. The city had its own schools and strip mall shopping centers. For efficiency, Levitt pioneered assembly-line production and fabrication methods. Reportedly, a new home was finished at the rate of every sixteen minutes.
By 1962, Pete Seeger popularized the social conformist, consumerism-lampooning 1962 song, “Little Boxes.” The singy-songy lyrics go: “Little boxes, on the hillside, made of ticky tacky … all the same … and the people … in the boxes, put in boxes like doctor and lawyer … and their children, going to university, to be put in boxes, made of ticky tacky …”
I was in the learning-to-be-doctor box at the time and remember seeing photos of Levittown’s treeless sameness and wondering what was going on. Half-a-century later, I understand it was the beginning of radical social transformation.
Mr. Levitt started what became suburban-sprawl, with explosions of strip malls and tract housing built on virgin land. The central shopping areas of nearly every small town and city were affected and often decimated. Main roads to towns became jumbles of big-box and other stores and fast food and chain restaurants. Today there is little distinguishing one place from another.
In some places, sprawl engulfed entire areas, creating run-on exurbs. Just under four million people live in Metropolitan Detroit’s approximately 100 cities, towns and hamlets. Malls and housing developments, sprinkled with some single homes, ramble over 1900 square miles of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties.
You have to watch for signs to know which city, town or township you’re in. A majority of people live in one town, shop and/or work in another, go to school in yet another, and play elsewhere. As a hint to how this reshaped the culture, few who live, work, study, or shop in Roseville know its importance in Macomb County’s history.
Sprawl, with networks of freeways built since the 1950s, produced geographic homogenation that transformed society. Paradoxically, people in exurbs and large city-suburban complexes live closer together, form alliances of shared values and interests, but are actually more spiritually separated from one another.
In other words, there is a dearth of a sense of larger community. We’ve become balkanized, divided into weary factions. Paralyzed Congress can’t find a way of dealing with waves of children coming to our borders. Republicans are determined to defeat the only serious, if lamely limited, attempt to reform our shamefully inefficient and dangerous health care system. And the Michigan Legislature is unable to do anything to even repair our disgraceful bridges, roads and highways – let alone prepare a 21st Century transportation system.
Today, our pledge of one nation, with liberty and justice for all, under a system of laws that establish justice, ensure tranquility and promote the general welfare, seems like a pipe dream. But it’s my pipe dream and I’m sticking to it.
So I dropped out of the negativity. I’m doing my best to engender a sense of community by loving everything as best I can and spreading kindness – like a 60s flower child.
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