I’ve been preparing to move, so I took a short break from writing to get in better shape both mentally and physically. My upcoming relocation is a pretty big deal for me, because I’ve never lived anywhere besides a fairly large city (Seattle) and a really huge city (Beijing), and I’m about to move to a place where the “big city” has only about 85,000 inhabitants (about twenty percent of whom are students at the local university), and most of the surrounding land is either rural or wilderness. In fact, the entire county I’m moving to has fewer inhabitants than just two out of Seattle’s four bordering suburbs combined. Given the burgeoning international trade through the I-5 corridor it’s growing fast, so that may not last forever, but there’s still a whole lot of room.
Naturally, the social milieu and political scene are very different, and I’ve been making an effort to learn a thing or two about them. For starters, I’ve discovered that the Tea Party really does exist, and isn’t merely a figment of urban liberals’ paranoid imagination as I had previously suspected (half seriously). Sometimes, I forget how many urban liberals actually came from small towns, and don’t take into account that many of them have a lot more personal experience with flyover America than I do.
These days, there aren’t all that many natives left in Western coastal cities, and there will be even fewer in the future as the extinction of the urban family accelerates. Most of the young people in Seattle, for example, are transplants from the suburbs and towns of the Northwest who came to the big city for jobs, fun or simply the status that comes with being an urbanite. Most of my childhood friends are long gone, as the cost of raising a family is just too steep in the city. Those who have stayed have, for the most part, inherited properties from their parents.
So I am in the strange position of being entirely urban, but also essentially alienated from the city of my birth. However, instead of seeing this as a bad thing, I’d like to take advantage of the fact that I have no psychic scars associated with small-town conformity to seize the opportunity and make a run for it while I still can. Do I feel sorry for the smug, liberal parents in my neighborhood who will have to face the music when their little ones hit kindergarten age and either shell out 20k+ per year on private school or send their progeny to schools in which some Cushitic dialect from the Horn of Africa dominates the playground and the little girls wear hijabs? Not at all. Perhaps because they despised the suburban and small town homogeneity they ran from so much, they’ll really enjoy shopping for goat products at the halal markets going up all around the neighborhood. Ah, the 98118, where the burqa and SWPL collide…
As for me, I’ll have access to a nearby Dutch farming community that provides the best dairy, meat and produce in Western Washington.
I may be getting ahead of myself here, but I’m really looking forward to becoming an advocate for my adopted community. I can bring the same passion for an alternative lifestyle that so many of the obnoxious SWPLs I encounter in Seattle had when they first rolled off the turnip truck, fresh from some bleak potato farm in Eastern Washington or Idaho, or maybe some cookie-cutter suburb on the eastside.
I’m beginning to think that one of the most important reasons cities have become so overwhelmingly liberal over the last generation is because people came to cities not so much to work and raise families as they used to, but to experience the “lifestyle.” For those of us who grew up in cities, much of this experience was an annoyance or, at best, a source of amusement. The things we really liked about the city, such as the convenience, the sense of community in the old neighborhoods and the tolerance for assorted characters who wouldn’t fit in anywhere else is gone, replaced by left-fascism, overpriced goods and real estate, congestion and endless fees and taxes. The entire place has turned into an amusement park, replete with hucksters, freaks and overpriced fare.
In my disappointment, I’ve been looking for answers, and I’ve found one man who has a particularly enlightened take on the state of urban America. He’s a professor (of all things) named Joel Kotkin. A native New Yorker, he moved to California in the 1970s, eventually ending up in Los Angeles, where he advocates for more family-centered urban policy. Calling himself an “urbanologist,” Kotkin takes on both leftist fanatics and the new oligarchs of the US. In addition to deflating the arguments of the pro-density Bladerunner-America proponents, he criticizes our broken immigration policy that places a higher priority on ethnic politics than valuable skills.
While absorbing his material over the past few days I found that his take on contemporary America is remarkably similar to mine. In fact, he’s given me some motivation and a sliver of hope for the future. However, I’m afraid that the big cities may not be receptive to change, and we may have to start in smaller cities and towns in the growing inland and Gulf Coast states, which are seeing continued economic growth even as stratification and social rigidity come to characterize the metropolitan titans of contemporary America.
That said, I think I’m going to shift my focus. I’ve been railing against feminism for some years, and it’s come to be akin to flogging a dead horse. Not that it isn’t a good cause, but I’m fighting the symptom instead of the root disease. I’ve known this all along, and have said so a number of times right here, but until recently I didn’t feel that I’d said enough about it. Feminism has become another one of those discredited but mandatory ideologies, like multiculturalism, blank-slatism and cultural relativism — we all know they are wrong even if we have to pretend not to while at work. But that’s changing: female newspaper and magazine columnists are openly stating that there are inborn psychological differences between men and women from time to time, and eventually the taboo will ease up. The intellectual battle against feminism is over. The feminists lost. They may still be sitting down next to the big kahuna and have undeserved political power, but everyone knows they’re frauds, and I don’t feel the need to make the argument any longer — at least not on a daily basis.
Instead of going over the same argument dozens of times, I’d like to take aim at a bigger adversary: the political and financial establishment. I’d also like to do so in a more concrete manner than merely blogging (not that I’ll give that up). I think there will be some opportunities to do so locally in my new home, and although I’m not sure how the site will fit into that, I’d like to keep readers in on it.
There is going to be a great deal of political and social change over the coming decade, and I don’t intend to sit on the sidelines.
