The Suburbs

I mentioned in class today that the suburbs "are both a cradle and a trap." We are what we make of them. I choose to take this middleground not because I cannot make a decision and not because I think that we must always turn the negative into a positive, but because the suburbs are both beneficial and detrimental to our development.

The suburbs are a safe place to "test the waters" of the city or "the wild." However, to call the city "the wild" further promotes a definition of the suburbs that I do not agree with. This definition is that the suburbs are inescapable havens of false purity where reality does not exist. False. Suburbs cannot rule us unless we allow them to do so. In fact, we must appreciate the security the suburbs have given us. Thanks to this security, we can move forward away from the suburbs with confidence and strength of will. I refuse to allow the suburbs to hold me back, but then again, they are not trying to hold me back - I feel no pressure to remain "stuck." Those of us who use the suburbs as an excuse for our failures must come to grips with what they want from life.

On a different note, I think the historical context of the suburbs as home to the middle class is both ironic and interesting. In the past, the suburbs were a place where the middle class could commute to work and home without living in the city. This remains true, although neither of my parents work in San Francisco. Furthermore, the suburbs were a promise of the potential to rise in one's social status - whether or not that climb was achieved by the middle class individual or not. This concept renders the poem's claim of permanent stratification null and void.

To put a modern, and somewhat extreme, spin on the concept of the "urban Utopia," the suburbs are a battleground for material supremacy. I suppose this is not a large departure from the suburbia of the past, but this concept is present now more than ever. In the city, among the skyscrapers, it is difficult to stand out. Too many people obscure the one person's influence over another. In contrast, in the suburbs, a "flashy car" or a new paint job will be noticed more easily and will do much more to enlarge the ego than the conditions of the city will allow.

Everyone has a different reason for being in the suburbs. I'm not a fan of Desperate Housewives, but I am a fan of Bones. Just as there is something to be said about a television show that makes it's money off of the modern idea of suburbia, there is something to be said about the anthropology and psychology of suburbian trends — but that's far too much to say in a blog that I have already filled with ranting.