FundamentallySound Blog

That experience I wrote about recently, of walking through such a desolate place as the area around west Oakland, had a big impact on me. I realized that, when it comes down to it, the basic conflict that eats Americans, makes the population overwhelmingly neurotic, un-rooted, and whiny, is the absolutely huge discrepancy between the way things are and the way they should be. By "should be" I mean the way things are reported as being, the way people talk about them, what the shared culture wants to believe. People still hold on to a vision of this country that is completely removed from reality. The populous actually believes that our foreign policy is in the best interest of the rest of the world, that the same number of people would have died in New Orleans had they been white and middle class, and that everyone has equal opportunity. Of course this is not the case, and the internal conflict that arises from this discrepancy between what is happening and what is supposed to happen is the cause for the general itchy neuroticism and ongoing frustration exhibited by nearly everyone in this huge stretch of land.

Luckily there are little pockets where this is not the case, but even in these little bubbles of sanity, the fact that you are still surrounded by a powerful culture with which you pretty much disagree on every point does get tiring after a while.