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I am completely aware there are lots of conservatives in America. I’ve been bracing myself for meeting them, as I made my way out West. I just didn’t expect to meet them in the form of young people in their early twenties, certainly not college students, and certainly not on public transport in Obama’s home town, the Democratic lock down that is Chicago.

So I accepted a generous invitation of visiting cultural sights such as architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Chicago home & studio with gratitude, not realising that my hosts for the day (which involved a lot of being trapped in their car) were pretty much Tea Partiers, only young, stylish and attractive. Which, let’s face it, is not the image that normally comes to mind.

The huge new Trump Tower in Chicago's downtown

In fact the boyfriend and girlfriend couple were nothing but generous, kind and thoughtful to me. I’m just pretty sure that wouldn’t have been the case if I’d been Hispanic. Which was funny, because the girl was half Hispanic – her dad from Peru – and she speaks decent Spanish. But Hispanics, blacks and women drivers came up in the first five minutes (women drivers were actually what started it all off….) and from then on in I knew there’d be trouble (at least if I didn’t keep my mouth shut).
I could have ignored the quip about women drivers – we used to humour him when Grandad started – but that led quickly to a conversation, all the while trapped in the car of course, about how Obama is not culturally black. This is an argument I have realised is fairly valid: Obama is completely atypical of black people in the US, and, dare one mention, is of course half white. Furthermore his family was not an enslaved family, unlike the history of most black families in America. And, unlike almost all black people, he has had a white person’s education at the very best schools and colleges that America has to offer, and money has to buy. Of course, this is a controversial if not offensive argument amongst most progressive Democrats, and understandably so. But at this stage I was still not sure what side of the fence they were falling down on, and I was finding some common ground. I started to become sceptical however after being told that blacks have had 50 years since the Jim Crow laws to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that this went for Hispanics too, and that Obama was socialising all the banks because he is on a mission to make everything owned by the government.

I was still naive enough at this point to answer frankly the question they put to me about how Obama is perceived in Europe. I gave an answer which I am pretty sure 85% of Europeans would be happy with, that Europeans in general and the British in particular still perceive Obama to be a blessed relief after that “moron” George W Bush.

The silence in the car around me was palpable.
I backtracked, clarifying that W was probably “not the sharpest tool in the box”, and I mumbled something about him being perceived by many in my country to be a puppet of other forces (of which, I did not elaborate). That’s about as two-way as the conversation got the entire day, which we were about ten minutes into. After that, I learned to listen with curiosity, fascination, and, it has to be said, a little each of respect and horror.

The conversation took the form of “you see the thing is Matt, there’s something happening in this country right now that you need to know about, something terrible”. Continue Reading »

Ottawa's war memorial

I’ve spent less than a week in Canada, to my sadness.

After a day, the differences between here and the US were tangible. After nearly a week, the differences are overwhelming.

As a young English guy from Guildford told me at a bar in Toronto, Canada has all the advantages of the US (which for him were late licenses and plentiful weed) with none of the drawbacks. To drugs and alcohol I might also add: liveable human-scale cities, cosmopolitan cultures, a national respect for linguistic and ethnic diversity, a relaxed and positive sense of national identity, decent public transport, a progressive political system that publicly funds political parties and outlaws all corporate donations, a largely non-psychopathic government, great outdoors (although so far I’ve seen a lot of low-grade grassland (it’s not prairie – that was killed that long ago)), plenty of space and natural resources (a mixed blessing), good comedians (apparently) and surprisingly good beer.

In Ottawa and Toronto (although not Montreal) I saw a very low level of homelessness. In fact I saw almost nothing but healthy happy people, in good houses, with a very nice quality of life.

Frankly, its surprising any Americans still live in the US.

Did I mention, Canada also has universal health care?

Canada’s health care bill argument had some of the same elements of people crying “communist” as we’ve just seen in the US; but that debate was concluded 50 years ago, and unlike the US, not only did the best side win, but it achieved a genuinely-progressive result: single-payer healthcare, similar to Britain’s National Health Service.

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It’s snowing again. It’s falling softly tonight, in big gentle flakes. Everything in the yard has a little snowy hat on nearly two feet tall. The snow’s piled up in the streets. With the cold, cars were conking out in the road, and walking home last night it was impossible to tell where the pavement ended and the road began.

Something happens though when it snows that I’ve never really seen in Britain: instead of just leaving the snow in the street, householders come out of their homes and shovel it, making the sidewalk snow-free and much safer to walk on.

I told a New Yorker friend how I felt this seems a touching gesture of community spirit; she replied that’s what she had thought, for a long time. Needless to say I like the idea of people each playing their small part in achieving a larger communal goal of the common good.

And it’s impressive! It’s impressive to see that people have all got out and pitched-in and cleared the sidewalks. As my housemate commented, you want to say “Well done Bushwick, well done Ridgewood!”.

But in fact, and this is even more surprising to me (coming from Britain), New Yorkers are legally obliged to shovel snow that lands on the sidewalk outside their house (and I’m sure the shovel manufacturers love that!). This makes sense of course, but it just takes away some of the sentimental appeal…

Incredibly, according to the New York Times, they’re legally obliged to do this during daytime “within 4 hours” of the snowfall ending! Which would seem to put some pressure on people, especially older people. Equally I can’t imagine many students getting it together to get out of bed and shovel before the snow police come round! I saw one old man (pictured) who was obviously behind in his shovelling efforts. I stepped around him, saying hello. If I had known he was being legally obliged to shovel his sidewalk and wasn’t just doing it to be community-spirited, I would have taken the shovel off of him and asked him to put the kettle on while I did it myself.

America – and I dare say Americans – have a strange mix of impulses; in this case, the desire to be community-spirited, tied to a legal obligation to be so. It makes sense that mobilising the person-power of every householder to shovel snow makes sidewalks clear a lot quicker than any army of city workers that could be realistically mustered; so in this sense an “individualistic” solution works. But the way the individualistic effort is socially and communally enforced intrigued me. In a country where a large number of people strongly reject government obliging them to do things and insist on individual voluntary action instead, I wonder whether this city statute doesn’t in some ways manage to appeal to both an individualistic sensibility and a community one.

Individualists are unlikely to challenge it because what could be more obviously selfish and un-community-spirited than refusing to pull one’s own weight?

People more used to collective government action can hardly fault it either; it gets the job done. And neither they nor the individualists need worry about a burden on the tax-payer, because there isn’t one! Not to their wallet anyway (initial capital purchase of shovel aside….).

There are problems of course; not least the “equality” issue that the old man had; his ability to complete the task was not the same as other’s.

But could this be a template for collective action on other issues? Litter? Homelessness? Climate change??

I find it amazing that the city has got away with people tolerating this prescriptive and burdensome ordinance, and presumably they do so because the problem is undeniable, pressing, universal, immediately obvious and tangible, and everyone has a degree of shared interest in its resolution.

Sadly the same cannot be said for homelessness and certainly not for climate change. Not because they are not important – but because people just don’t feel aware of them in the same way. Litter almost gets up there, but most people are clearly able to tolerate a lot of litter (certainly around here in Bushwick) before being provoked into individual action.

If only awareness of important pressing issues could be as obvious as the weather……. Oh, wait: it will be as obvious as the weather – literally – when climate change really bites. It will be the weather! And it will not only bring storms and floods and droughts and hurricanes to America but global economic infra-structural breakdown. But by then, of course, without a massive change in awareness, prevention will be too late.

So, my first experience of living in America is sharing an apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York with a fellow “hipster” in his 30s (i.e. young, recently-settled, urban, arty and middle class). I’ve been in New York for over a week now and in the last few days have just started to relax into the neighbourhood of Bushwick. I’ll be frank. It’s not what I’m used to. Coming from a leafy middle-class arty small-town backwater like Lancaster in northern England, the urban, impoverished, dirty, jumbled and to my mind mean streets of Bushwick Brooklyn somewhat make me feel as if I’ve jumped in at the deep end.

Bushwick is undoubtedly poor, with over 75% of children in the neighborhood born in poverty.

But there is another aspect of Bushwick that is having an effect on my middle-class psyche, an effect that should not be overlooked, especially not by progressives. Bushwick just isn’t white.

As an anti-racist I struggle, as I think we all do, to talk about questions of race while trying to always maintain the right balance of respect, political-correctness and honesty. Political correctness has never been my strong point, so I think I’ll major on the respect and the honesty. Although my worry about walking these streets has lessened with familiarity, it’s still there, and although the streets are much dirtier than I’m used to – the occasional rat scurries by, and the atmosphere is sometimes silently infused with the smell of pot – my fear is – let’s face it – of people. Specifically of being mugged, and especially of being knifed. Is this a valid fear?

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