This Rant Is My Rant

I haven't updated in forever. Sue me.

In lieu of writing about my life during the past month or so, I thought I'd just let loose with a few thoughts that have been buzzing around in my head recently. This strange conglomeration of ideas has largely been due to the odd assortment of books I've been reading, the trips --to Huntsville, Binghamton and Bethlehem-- that I've recently undertaken, the quickly (yet never quickly enough) approaching end to the school year, the Long, Flat, Seemingly Endless Bataan Death March to the White House, and the annual perfect sports storm of baseball season getting underway while the hockey and basketball seasons thunder (or limp) to a close. Yes, at first glance these things have absolutely nothing to do with one another, but to my mind they are intimately connected. Now either my brain has been completely fried by dealing with teenagers or I've stumbled upon a major portion of my personal philosophy that I haven't had the words to express until now.

See, I'm having a problem with land. It first dawned on me when I gazed out of the windows of a tour bus full of 10th graders to spy a familiar sign of home. Yes, when coming down the PA Turnpike Northeast Extension, I saw the large red ALPO water tower looming in front of me and knew we'd soon be in the Lehigh Valley. We were driving from the University of Binghamton to Lehigh University, showing the 10th graders what this whole "college" thing was about, and I was struck by the odd familiarity of this ridiculous dog food-sponsored water tower that was rather inconveniently making me homesick. Who gets choked up looking at a bright red ALPO water tower? Jeez. We turned onto Rt. 22 and all the familiar landmarks started whizzing by at 55 mph. There's the dealership where Mom and Dad bought our first minivan. There's the Lehigh Valley Mall. Hey, it's bigger now! What the hell? There's the Friendly's on Airport Road where everyone used to go for ice cream, especially if we'd already been to Perkins four times that week. There's the hospital where my brother spent New Year's with an enormous Popeye-esque growth on his elbow. There's the two-hundred-year-old church where I sat with my parents and listened to Christmas carols after we'd all given up on Catholicism. There's the Steel Mill, that once employed the whole town and is now being turned into luxury loft condos and casinos. There's Lehigh, where I won the Turkey Trot race without being an official runner, where I took my first college courses, where my father made a name for himself and a life for all of us, where his friends and my friends spent so many of their waking hours. All of it. All of this. There's my home.

As this is swirling through my head, I get broadsided by an unforeseen thought: what makes all of this so special? As my Mom wisely said when preparing to leave the house that she'd shared with my Dad for three decades, "When all our stuff's gone, it's just four walls." I found myself extending that pronouncement to my entire hometown. When I'm not there, when my family's not there, when the majority of my friends and the people I care about have left...what is this place? What makes it special? The more I thought about it, the more I came to the disturbing conclusion that there was nothing special about it. The thought couldn't be stopped, and I kept expanding my criteria. Is Pennsylvania something to get excited about? Does the East Coast really have something unique going on? How particularly grand is our country? I then found myself noting that there are really no allegiances past the size of a nation. No one gets really worked up over their particular continent or hemisphere being better than another. That said, the Southern Hemisphere is clearly inferior. Still, at every level below that, it's fair to say that people get really worked up.

Nations seem to be the most obvious and egregious example of land loyalty. War is clearly the logical extension a fervent belief in the superiority of one's own land and the inferiority of someone else's. Those who haven't been in combat would do well to witness a crowd of people watching a World Cup soccer match to get some idea of the passions involved. In all seriousness, how many millions (billions?) have died based on the belief that one man's rightful conquest is another man's rightful homeland? Israelis and Palestinians routinely kill each other over the least oil-rich portion of (literally) godforsaken desert in the entire Middle East. What makes this land so special? And don't say religion, because anyone willing to kill someone else and blame it on God clearly hasn't been reading his Bible/Torah/Koran/etc. closely enough. Whether for pride, power, or lebensraum, the map of Europe has been redrawn once every few decades or so to fight over the same patches of ground. What makes this land so special? Millions of men marching, riding on horseback, driving tanks, trying to kill millions of other men marching, riding or driving in the opposite direction. And for thousands of years, it just keeps happening. As Blackadder famously said, World War I "would've been a damn sight simpler if we'd just stayed in England and shot fifty thousand of our men a week." That probably applies to most other wars as well, with varying weekly figures.

The World Cup analogy was a good one because the next level down seems to have a lot to do with sports teams. Perhaps, because we can't actually declare war on Detroit no matter how much we may be tempted to, we just send our sports teams at them and hope that their inevitable defeat on the field/ice/court will convince them of their inherent inferiority and get them to gentrify their downtown already and start producing a better lineup of automobiles or something. Anyone who's ever been in a bar where Arsenal and Chelsea supporters are both watching a match will know just how close sports is to warfare. I also know from personal experience that Blackhawks-Redwings games, Eagles-Cowboys games and Sox-Yanks games can teeter ever so near to devolving into all-out brawls among the fans in the seats or in bars. In any of these cases, and hundreds more like them, disparaging words uttered about your team, though they may be hateful, unoriginal and crass (Yankees suck) can cause you to feel a personal pain as though you yourself have been slighted. Even if the comments carry some sort of logical sense to them (face it, Boston's got a better pitching staff, all your guys are old and overpaid, and you're in last place), you're still likely to rise to the defense of your team. It's as though you're a member of a tribe and you will gladly do battle to defend that tribe's honor. Indeed, I can report that I've noticed that as a fan of the NL Central-leading Cubs, wearing the regalia of your team and noticing someone else in similar garb evokes a sudden sense of community. Especially with the Cubs history of failure, futility and fuckups, there's a very knowing nod when one man in a Cubs hat nods to another man in a Cubs jersey on a street anywhere in the world. But really, are they all that special?

Now I think of my affinity with the town in which I currently reside, New York City. New Yorkers are famously proud of their town, and they damn well should be because it's the best goddamned town in the whole freakin' world, alright? Sheesh. I live here three years and look what happens. I also have a special love for my past places of residence: Bethlehem, Evanston/Chicago, and Columbus. But are they inherently better than other towns? My parents have recently taken up residence in Huntsville, Alabama and report it to be neither full of rednecks nor utterly inhospitable to Yanks (or Brits for that matter). It's quite possible --or so I've been led to believe-- that there may be one or more other towns in this country that would make a suitable home. I'm pretty sure that most everyone is convinced that they know of the greatest town in the county/state/nation and I'm also pretty sure that we're not all correct. Though some towns may be objectively bad (Detroit) I'm sure we can't say definitively that there's a "best town" out there, though I'm sure many lay claim to that very title.

My students have an even more insular idea of land loyalty. While I've heard them argue incessantly over whether the Dominican Republic is superior to Puerto Rico --I calmly inform them that both are inferior to the United States, so what does it matter?-- they more frequently take up sides on the basis of their neighborhoods. Most of them are from the same three areas: Harlem, Washington Heights, and the South Bronx. Keep in mind that all of these areas exist within the same 5 square miles north of Central Park. Nevertheless, they will fervently argue about the pros and cons of each of their neighborhoods. How could you date a guy from the Heights? Yo, Bronx is wack. And so on. It even comes down to individual streets on occasion. I've actually overheard conversations regarding the relative merits of 168th St. versus 125th St. In case you're wondering, 125th St. is vastly superior. Apparently.

How much can you really tell about someone just by knowing where they're from? Well, nothing, frankly. Yet it's one of the first questions we ask someone upon meeting them, especially if they talk funny. We try to establish some sort of rapport through geography, as if someone whose parents resided in the same region as your parents when you were each delivered from your respective mothers' wombs would naturally understand where you were coming from in a more philosophical sense as well. But how can this be? Why should someone from my home town have more of a chance of thinking or feeling the same way I do about anything? Is there really an unspoken bond between people who've eaten at the same diners or shopped at the same malls?

The majority of the people in my hometown were not really intelligent, interesting human beings. I know. I observed them in the diners and malls. This is not a slight on my origins; I tend to believe that the majority of all humans are not especially intelligent or interesting as a rule. Thus, as I've wandered through life from Bethlehem to Chicago to Columbus and thence to New York, I've fostered numerous acquaintances, several friendships, and precious few real, fulfilling relationships. Some of them outlast the town in which they were first incubated, many of them do not. Others are rekindled by a chance encounter, while some get by with a simple "How're ya doin'?" every now and then.

I come to the relatively depressing conclusion that most people I meet (and likely will meet) in my life will be, at best, the kind of people who, once introduced at a party, fade to the background and are maybe good for 10 minutes of sterile conversation before the end of the evening. Yet I prefer to dwell on the positive. That is, I can think of the few dozen people in the world who've meant something to me in my life so far and know that they originated in places as far away as Australia and as near as next door. These are the people with whom I can have real conversation. We may not agree on the specifics, but we can talk about life as people who have lived it with similar goals in mind. Were I to spend a portion of my life in Indonesia, I would find people of that calibre there as well. Or China. Or Burkina Faso. Or Venezuela. I do not believe, and cannot accept, that there is a land in this world that can lay claim to having a greater percentage of decent human beings than any other. I instead believe that the relative ratio of worthwhile people to worthless ones remains fairly constant worldwide. Hint: there are many more worthless ones. But what a challenge this presents! There are wonderful, interesting people the world over who are just out there waiting to be found. Wherever life takes us, whatever town, country, or hemisphere we find ourselves occupying, we have the opportunity to develop meaningful relationships with the people we find there. We may even connect with them in ways that surpass our childhood playmates or college classmates. The only way to find out is to go there and see. Some of the greatest friends of your life may be ones you haven't yet discovered.

So perhaps I'm a little unpatriotic here. I don't feel that the United States is the greatest country in the world, at least not in terms of the quality of humanity it produces. I'm also not so proud of my home state, town, or current place of residence to feel that I'm more likely to find better people in those places than elsewhere. I can, however, be proud of humanity in general. That slim minority of people who meant something to me at one time, or who continue to be meaningful to me today, or with whom I've yet to connect, will ultimately be the test of just how much of a positive impact I've had in this world. In a strictly Newtonian sense, I hope that I would have at least as much of a positive effect on them as they've had on me. Rather than excluding whole cities, states, or countries from my search for commonality, there's a joy to be had in finding an unexpected connection with someone whose geography couldn't be more different from your own.