A Plea for Unity

Tomorrow, my wife and I are headed for our annual round of family Christmas visits in Texas. So this will likely be my last post of 2009. In that spirit I hope that you all had a wonderful year, that you all have a Merry Christmas (whether you celebrate it or not, I still hope that the Christmas season finds you well and contented!), and here’s to a fabulous 2010.

I would like to end 2009, however, by reminding everyone that what unites America is so much stronger than what divides us.

It felt like 2009 started on an extremely unifying note: the inauguration of our first black president reminded us all about how far we’ve come as a country, and really brought about more unity in this country than I’ve ever seen for a positive event. (As opposed to the unity brought about by war, disaster, or attack.) Since then, however, it seems we’ve slid right back into old patterns of distrust and fear. Moreover, it feels to me like this distrust has a decidedly regional bent to it–and that this regionalism is growing stronger in the minds of many.

I see that regionalism fed by Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, and Right-Wing Talk Radio. I also see it in the way that The New York Times discusses small-town America and prominent Evangelical denominations as if they were foreign phenomenon and in the way that ESPN commentators fixate on East Coast and California sports teams. It’s in the educated Easterners who stereotype Texas as being full of cowboys and Republican hicks, and in the way that Texans refer to Massachusetts as if it were a distasteful haven of liberals run a muck.

Even today, when The New York Times published a column on their website by their self-proclaimed “Western representative” about regional differences, it came across as an enlightened in-the-know Middle American pitying his ignorant New York colleagues. (He may be able to find random Texas towns on a map, but most of the people I graduated high school with in Minnesota couldn’t keep Vermont and New Hampshire straight and it took quite a while before my Texas educated wife could get “all those I and O states” straightened out.)

Well, let’s just get a few things straight.

First, the Top 5 Largest Cities in the country are: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia. That’s by the 2000 census, although it is expected that in the 2010 census Phoenix will have passed Philadelphia. The Top 5 Largest Metropolitan Areas are: New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia. The point? Not all major American cities are located on either coast. You’ll notice that not all of those cities are in blue states or abut an ocean. And yet what unites those cities is so much more than what divides them.

Dallas and Houston are good examples of what I’m talking about. These are the fourth largest Metro Area and City, respectively. Both are located in a very red state, Texas. Both are extremely diverse cities, with large black, Hispanic, and Asian populations. Both have urban cores that are extremely liberal and Democratic, exurban neighborhoods that are extremely Republican, and suburban districts that are mixed. Both have elite universities in rich, liberal communities that remind me a lot of Cambridge, MA. Both struggle with the same basic local issues that New York City and Boston have: gun violence; relations between the police and various minority communities; building consistently good schools in large and diverse cities; providing low-cost and effective public transportation; etc. They may be located in Texas, but these places are no more Sarah Palin country than New York City or Boston are.

On the other hand, Massachusetts isn’t nearly as liberal as my Texas relatives would like to believe. The laws regulating the sale and consumption of alcohol here are strict enough to please my most teetotaling Baptist relatives–and to appall anyone who grew up in rural Wisconsin. Boston has no night-life to speak of–I’ve never seen a city, much less a college town like Cambridge, that shuts down so thoroughly at 10pm. Many Sundays the place turns into a ghost town. The iconography is slightly different (images of the saints vs. crosses), but you’ll see as much religious symbolism on the houses in a random neighborhood street in rural Massachusetts as you will in rural Alabama. And the advertisements for strip clubs and adult shops are not nearly as prominent along Massachusetts freeways as they are in Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, or most other middle-American cities I’ve seen.

The point is that there is no part of America that is more virtuous or “real” than any other part. There are both educated and ignorant people in all parts of the country. And no matter where we go, we are all Americans, no matter where we live, how much money we make, where we were educated (or not), what color our skin is, or even what languages we speak.