Spare Change, Part 2

Even if all the poor aren’t in jail, or perhaps because of that, you can always retire to Sun City, Arizona up around Phoenix or to Sun City Vistoso just north of Tucson, where my mother makes her home, and where we will camp out until our house sells in Massachusetts. There are only old people here, and this is by design. The streets are empty except in the early morning, when the golf carts head for the club and the dog owners get taken for a walk. Noone under 55 need apply here, and it is rumored also that even children may only visit for so long. We may yet find ourselves kicked out of the neighborhood, too young, too lively, too broke…the rationale is hard to come by. These people have protected themselves against their own children, or everyone else’s kids. In so doing, they have also excluded anyone unlike themselves.

It is, I suppose, their privilege, but it strikes me as a foretaste of oblivion. Levy visited Sun City near Phoenix and wrote this:

“The problem, in short, is that all this implies a profound break with the very tradition of civic mindedness and civility-I won’t even say of compassion-that was responsible, and continues to be responsible, for this country’s greatness. And this experiment in privatizing a public space at the expense of a community cannot fail to create a terrible precedent…if we ratify the principle of this gilded ghetto based on membership in a certain age and income bracket, then by what right can we tomorrow prevent the development of cities forbidden to the old?...In whose name can we resist the definitive balkanization of American space that could well result? (Levy, p 129)

“…I leave Sun City with a feeling of unease, no longer knowing if you come here to save or to damn yourself, to banish death or savor a foretaste of it”. (Levy, p130)

Of course, the Balkanization of American space is an old story. North of Atlanta, the experience of the poor black in New Orleans, now this “retirement community”…all products of fear or preference or probably both. This distancing from the “Other” leaves me profoundly conflicted. Were these insular communities active in the production of culture: unique, rich and interesting lives contributing to some larger communal and inclusive vision, then it would scare me less. New Orleans may be the exception, but I do not think that this is what is going on.

Personally, for now because who knows what I'll feel like at 80, I choose the “Other”. I choose variety. I choose difference and conflict and friction, the new. I choose a challenge. I choose dialectic and synthesis without end, each new result juxtaposed with each new opposite and engaged in discovering a new synthesis. I choose change.

I will admit to waking up now with the unsettling knowledge that we have lost our moorings. It is a peculiar vertigo, if I may borrow one last thought from Levy. If it takes some time to figure out this new life however, if we encounter boredom and frustration and indifference and feelings of unease, if sometimes we look at each other and ask “what the hell were we thinking”?, at least we will know this: we are alive, we are engaged in the world, we are trying something new and we are actively searching and ultimately, we will find our way. I am sure of it.

written by

roel krabbendam on July 30, 2007 from Tucson, United States

from the travel blog: Spare Change

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Roel,
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Franklin

written by franklin on December 4, 2007

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