Reply #10: Great post! [View All]

[hunter]

"...the spotless, pristine, all-white environments these people live in, I can imagine that a place like my neighborhood in SF would look intimidating."

I love San Francisco. I can't afford to live there, but my family and I live in another place with a rainbow of people and cultures.

I get very uncomfortable in the monochromatic places you've described above, especially when I visit some suburban shopping center where most of the kids are white, wealthy, protected, and so damned lost.

Rural areas can be the same way. People are afraid of anyone who isn't like them. Outside their home turf they are timid and afraid, and the media feeds those fears -- telling them that the stranger is always someone to fear.

It's sad, but it is human instinct to accept the man or woman we see every day on the television as a "familiar face" and we assume that it's somehow a two-way street, when nothing could be further from the truth. The man or woman on the television set is actually selling your fears to the highest bidder, selling you out, trying to push you into a cloistered place disconnected from the harsher realities of the world.

In this cloistered place George W. Bush is not a monster who kills people, or gets people killed, instead he is a down-home hero with a friendly face, a nice fellow doing his best to fill Ronald Reagan's boots.

How do I get through the barrier? Mostly I don't. But sometimes I notice a thin spot in someone's bubble and I'll gently brush against it. If the bubble pops, I welcome them back into the world.