My girlfriend and I were planning on going camping today, but my girlfriend's white suburban middle class parents wouldn't let us, saying it was 'dangerous'. Both her and I agree that white middle class people are way too afraid of everything for some reason, but I don't know why. Any ideas?
Suburbs are sold as prefab sociable neighborhoods, but they mostly alienate. Especially since more and more people just stare at a screen when they get home until they go to bed. Most people don't even really know their neighbors anymore.
Alienation leads to suburbanites not engaging with the world outside their insular bubble. Most people in the suburbs only interact with their immediate family daily. Without healthy socialization that would confront wrong-headed or wild ideas they just stew in their theories about how the world works. Being called on your shit keeps people grounded in reality. Suburbanites in general are like this. It is not just white suburbanites.
The suburbs were a mistake.
Mainstream news of the kind that boomers consume is just story after story of violent scary shit, with no context of how rare it is for some of these crimes/accidents to happen to you.
Also true crime. Also NCIS and shit lol.
These fucking shows have rotten my moms brain completely. Its fucking disgusting and i hate it and she won't stoo watching them. Literally 24/7 of that NCIS trash.
My brain just vomited inside my skull and now its drowning in it its own puke. Thanks for that.
Scrolling through the TV recently I saw some channel had "Fear thy Neighbour" and "Killer Coworkers" as longstanding shows...
:zizek-fuck:
I think some of it comes from our politics and culture turning large amounts of boomers into honestly pretty violence-minded people. They love thinking about "getting an opportunity" to shoot and kill some (dark skinned) attacker or killing the MSNBC anchor or whatever. So when they walk into their office paranoid af someone is thinking about killing them, it's projection but it's also likely another boomer has the same thoughts.
I live in a rural area, and it's reversed in this scenario. People here will go camping and hunting for a week, but they'll be terrified the shitass "town" 15 miles away will be attacked by antifa/BLM/Muslims.
Basically, they'll always be scared, just the specifics change.
I was in a really rural part of my area and I saw a woman jogging with a straight up 6-shooter. I couldn’t tell if she had a holster or if it was athletic wear specifically meant for firearms, but she was definitely wearing a sports bra and shorts lol
I just found it funny because the chud depiction of “the city” is that it’s a place where it’s dangerous all the time, while you (at least until x years ago) don’t need to lock your doors where they live. But obviously this woman felt the need to be strapped jogging out in the country.
To be clear, doing anything as a woman can be fucking dangerous because men can be unimaginably awful, so I don’t blame her at all for having a weapon. I just still think there’s a bit of irony there that I found funny
I lived off a street off of 14th street Atlanta for years and never locked my front door.
but they’ll be terrified the shitass “town” 15 miles away will be attacked by antifa/BLM/Muslims.
Libertarian roommate 1 was convinced that Antifa was going to attack a courthouse in a cattle town that is an hour's drive from any of the cities with BLM protests. That town is infamous for its smell and rabidly denying COVID so nobody in their right mind would go there. His plan was to load his car, with an infidel sticker on it of course, full of guns and drive around that town until antifa tries to carjack him at which point he'd get to save the day. He was personally motivated because he read they were lynching anyone who drives a truck and were killing any horses they could find.
Libertarian roommate 2 was convinced that Antifa was going to attack the small businesses in our town, a farming town with one street. He, unemployed, had tears in his eyes as he asked to borrow one of my guns so that he could stand in front of a random business on the same street- the only street- as the police station.
People of the land. The common clay of the new west.
My fat boomer boss got scared when he rode his motorcycle through the city. "anybody could just come right up to you" or something to that effect. He said he won't go back without his gun. I hope he gets [redacted]
My boomer coworkers have done more to push me left than any leftist org.
My own prejudices might show up, but I've noticed that a lot of western middle class people just have this very vegetable like mellow curated existence, where things are supposed to be kep quiet, polite, toned down, restrained, non-provocative, and nothing is really ever supposed to happen, outside of a very mellow curated list of experiences. The most exciting stuff happens only on the TV screen or in the computer game. Or when you have a polite dinner with some guests or a backyard BBQ. Everything out of the ordinary is scary, every change is terrifying, mayo is too spicy. Of course this is painting with broad strokes, and usually people do have one or other escape from this life, but I keep seeing it in this type of people. I sound like an edgy teenager but I keep seeing it again and again and again
When I think about some of the people in my personal life I truly despise, I find myself mentally asking them: when was the last time you thought, said, or experienced anything CNN would not approve of?
I have a couple of people in my life that I really can't stand, and I don't really know why. Theyre both white males, who talk a little bit of woke talk, but whose privilege at every step of their lives just drips from them. They're not even rich or whatever, they are just such libs that I know they don't actually give a shit about any of the environmental or equal right stuff they talk about.
Maybe I do know why. Biggest cases of lib brain.
In school we were always conditioned to think that getting in trouble and if the law is involved your life will be ruined forever and have no chance of success.
I got hired at my current company while I had an arrest warrant out. Background check my ass
Was it for a violent crime? Not trying to pry, just curious now about
yourthat situation. That’s my only reason why they wouldn’t say anything about it (if it wasn’t) or they just didn’t outright do it. LolIt was not a violent crime. I know they didn’t check because I got called in months later by my manager to ask about it. Apparently someone had found my name in a public database of arrest warrants and sent it to him. It would have shown up at time of hire if they had checked. So here we are lol
If someone owns a forest and doesn’t want campers there, they will put signs up lol
I mean the suburbs literally exist in the state they do today because of a phenomenon know as “white flight”. In general, I’ve found that people enjoy the suburbs because they get to live in a place that is relatively cheap, has a short commute to a city, and they never need to interact within anyone outside of their bubble. Despite the fact that you’re very close to hundreds of neighbors when living in the suburbs, it’s actually quite isolationist and harbors an irrational fear of anything outside your comfort zone. Most white suburbanites would rather spend their days going to work, watching tv before bed, and taking their bratty kids to Chuck E Cheese on the weekends
Extreme isolation from any actual community as well as nature combined with a media that is built to sell fear.
I think millennials and younger don't understand how bad the media environment in the 80s and 90s was for breeding fear of roving bands of crack-using robbers who were breaking into homes nightly, stealing everyone's hard earned SUV's, and stealing children off the street.
Boomers also fully believe that the rate of violent crime is higher now than it was when they were kids, despite the fact that violent crime in the US has been declining for decades
Dude its not even suburbanites. I live out in the boonies and my mom used to get mad if she came home late, after i had gone to bed, and any of the doors were unlocked. She'd say shit like "someone could come bop you in the head while you were sleeping." Like we have low to ground level windows and a huge ass bay window on the other side of the house. Like in her white boomer head there are the cartoonish black and mexican dudes sneaking up to our door like "oooo boy, if this doors unlock we's gonna bop this whitey while he's a sleeping we are." Then the doors locked and they are like "golly gosh darn guess we'll just leave instead of throwing some of these easily accessible landscape bricks through this giant ass window. That would make a real mess."
They don't have enough wealth and status to feel secure in their position in society but they have enough to be afraid of losing it and are aware that a significant amount of racialised poors are below them in the social pecking order.
Meanwhile the suburban ideology of "my home is my castle" combined with the lack of communal spaces like playgrounds or laundry rooms creates a lot of tiny kingdoms with little socialising and interaction. Humans are social creatures and being this disconnected from the people around you leads to anxiety.
Covid has really blown the lid off for me. A year of social isolation had definitely taken its toll. I can still swing human interaction, but it went from easy and smooth, to anxiety inducing. I can see how living in what amounts to permanent social isolation in a suburb can cause that sort of defensive psychosis.
The Reactionary Mind is a good book about this. Reactionaries—and the American middle class is pretty reactionary—have this very "supple" brain which allows them to sense danger that may be completely out of proportion to what exists in reality. This is at least partly why chuds rant about Biden being a communist. They can sense the danger in having a president who is at least nominally supposed to be doing something for people who are not already insanely rich. When you give the poor a finger, they might take the whole hand!
I also want to establish that this "supple" brain is a dialectic and not an example of idealistic deterministic calipers. One is born into the middle class, one is infected with its habitual terror of everything (generated by the alienation inherent to capitalism and suburbia), one then limits oneself to nothing but mayo thoughts and people and experiences, and this makes that supple brain even more supple, and on and on.
I have no idea, but I can relate. I told some of my co-workers I was going to a concert (pre-covid) and they freaked out and said it's unsafe for me to go alone.
Girls really should go with someone! :angery:
One thing no one talks about about being a parent is that you are constantly having intrusive thoughts about your children dying. Something about the chemical changes in your brain during pregnancy just says, “I know you just had a newborn baby and I know the worst intrusive thought you’ve ever had is sticking your hand down the garbage disposal, but let’s have a constant stream of ways in which you could find your baby dead.”
And it just never really stops. I constantly imagine in vivid detail the thought my of my kid mangled with broken bones from falling down the stairs or I project the memory of finding my dog dead in the road onto my kid while they’re riding a bike. It gets less intense and easier to deal with, but it’s fucked up
I'll always remember my dad trying to talk me out of a hiking trip with a friend in the winter because he thought we might get lost and die in the snow or skid out in ice on the road. It was above freezing.
