Last week I wrote about how astonished I was to move from madly multicultural New York to North Carolina and see, close up, the "immigration problem" that Lou Dobbs and a lot of Republican Congressmen have been yammering about, and that hundreds of thousands of Latinos and their supporters marched about this past April. (I’d gotten a preview then, when my Chicago-native parents quit going to their favorite Florida fish store forever because its owner fired the employees who took the day off for the march. The fish-store restaurant’s local patrons, by contrast, stood up and cheered.)
After almost 40 (!) years in New York City, I’m living in North Carolina for a while. (As Ah-nuld says, “I’ll be back.”) Chapel Hill, as a university town in the midst of the high-tech Triangle, doesn’t present much culture shock for an expat Northern urbanite; the place is swarming with us. But beneath the façade of ivy the older cultural landscape of North Carolina persists, and that submerged world is reeling with a culture shock that has almost nothing to do with town vs. gown.
This is a convert talking.
I was once a big booster of that disputed decade. I even wrote a whole book in its mildly qualified praise. Sure, it spiraled out of control, its embarrassing excesses were to be repudiated, but its heart, I thought, was all good. It was visionary. It was transforming. It was ecstatic. It was spiritual. It was -- Youth.
It wasn’t the happiest, this 230th birthday of ours. Here in New York, the fireworks defied the rain. Americans gamely oohed and ahhed at the starbursts, waved tiny flags and sparklers, and ate corn on the cob and ice cream. But the whole time we had this sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs, like children in a family where divorce is in the air.
We’re well on the way to becoming the Divided States of America.
Blogs
Subscribe