It takes a person to raise a village

I don’t like to think of the city and the suburbs as opposing worlds. However, the conditions of my life have repeatedly pointed to a gap between these worlds. Places and experiences appear on a continuum running from cosmopolitan to country.

In high school, I lived in two modes. One involved sitting on the couch watching classic films Friday nights, and fulfilled my suburban persona. The other entailed any strange adventure into a Boston event/performance I could pull together. These outings re-fueled my Friday couch-time imaginings of what a life in the city would be like.

In college I did live in the city. I went on long walks alone through the city’s streets, images of broad green lawns and the moon from my rooftop view at home floating in between honking cars. The chasm between my understandings of city and suburb remained stubbornly wide. I didn’t know which place I belonged, but I knew absolutely that they were distinctly different realities.

This way of seeing of mine bugs me because it uses places, rather than people’s behavior or choices, to define people. It says that a person submits to character rather than cultivating it. It’s like our identities are uncomfortable uniforms designed either by Walmart or Donna Karan.

Pesky distinctions between urban and rural people still arise in my head more often than I’d prefer. This person speaks slowly; he must go for long bike rides along quiet rural roads on the weekend. That person wears baggy, outworn clothes; she must return home to the 15th floor of an industrial apartment building at night. City people are alert, if not well-educated. Country people are kind, if not in touch with societal realities. People in the suburbs are wealthy but oblivious, while those from the city are poor and clear-sighted.

I doubt that I am the only one who passively has these thoughts. It takes some effort to become aware of the lives that exist in between the ways one has been taught to think of things.

Ideas are easy and realities are hard - which is probably the reason why I am writing this.

I wonder how I and others have grown into a place where our experience of the people and lives around us is ideologically filtered. Not racially, not religiously, but ideologically filtered. Part of me believes that I can judge a person’s cognitive and/or emotional character based on their geographical origin. This belief disconnects me from people, but also from society as a whole.

My ideas of people are skewed, and so my idea of the places they are from must be similarly inaccurate. If I don’t understand any other parts of my culture than the ones I have lived in, what makes me a member of that broader, complex culture?

Some might say that each person has a role in society outside of which it is not his/her right to step. They argue that each person has possessions, material or of character, which it is their job alone to care for and understand. Those from the city are not suited for the leisure of thought allowed by a rural life, and those from outside the city are not capable of handling its conversely heady, production-oriented environment. Still others might say that the issue of ideological alienation is insignificant in comparison with our more obvious causes of division: political polarism, racism, religious differences, nationalism amid a growing trend of immigration.

Before thinking about the racial, religious, political, or cultural landscapes of city and suburb, I had to be fully in both places. In high school, my idea of an ideal life in the city blinded me to the closeness of my home’s comfort. In college, my nostalgia for the simplicity and silence of suburbia distracted me from the thrill of diversity I had longed for at home.

In seeing myself as I have been, I have become aware of a concept more basic than that of race, religion, politics, and even identity. I have coome to see that my home is a place that I choose. I am neither a city nor a suburb person, but a person who chooses whether or not to see either. Having made that choice, I can now choose how to be both.