The Weather was great for the Lake City Seafair Parade. The crowds were thick, the Dick's Drive-in was packed.
These Seafair parades are a bit of Americana that grace the streets of the city much too rarely. Here's these kids in purple tutu's carefully tossing batons, kids in blue leotards and big white cowboy hats dancing in the street, guys in old tractors waving to the crowd, guys in fancy western garb bouncing around in an old truck, Mason's and Eagles and Commodores. It's our secret lives, our secret pleasures on the street for a laugh and a good cause. We keep so much hidden during our working days. We could use a parade daily.
I have been thinking about the parade in the context of The Big Sort. The author, Bill Bishop, will be our guest in the first hour of my radio show on August 4th. The subtitle of the book spells out his argument: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Bishop argues that the success of American democracy depends on a healthy public space where people can disagree and come to a compromise, however messy. But as we isolate ourselves by race, religion, income, and other factors, we lose that space. Societies without a way to accommodate disagreement break apart. Bishop sees this happening now. It is a re-iteration of Putman in Bowling Alone and Franks in What's the Matter with Kansas. Bishop breaks down the fragmentation county by county, neighborhood by neighborhood
Which brings me to a question and takes us back to the Lake City Parade. Wasn't that community coming together, group by group, to take part in this larger, shared event? Yet each group is sponsored by its own church or club, isolated during their practice and preparations. Who knows but that each group might even self select for people of the same backgrounds. Given the likelihood of that, then the coming together at an event becomes even more important, doesn't it. I was most taken by the Seattle All-City Band. How often do kids from Sealth and Ballard and Garfield get to work together?
What are your examples, of both the isolation that is occurring and those outposts where people mix? And if Bishop and the others are correct, what is to be done? Or are we witnessing the disintegration of political America?
Steve Scher
Blogged with the Flock Browser
2 comments:
Well, honestly we need to look at the history of America after the Depression and WW II as being a unique time after a major "shared experience" that cut across class and race. What we've been experiencing in the past two decades is simply a reversion to the mean and probably a more realistic income distribution. If you also look at the fact that for many small towns there isn't enough local business to sustain high-end professional class jobs, its no wonder people are self shorting, at least for economic reasons. Case in point, when there alot of small retailers in a town, those shopkeepers would retain local book-keepers and lawyers. If you have a Wal-Mart or such, that work evaporates because it is done out of a corporate HQ. ..
When they self sort then, do we end up compeletly isolated, even to the extent that we attend different public events? The wealthly classes to the Bite of Seattle, the poorer classes to Seafair parades?
Pre World War II, there were shared spaces, more people in the broad middle, more opportunity for some mixing within different communities through working associations and ensuing civic competitions. Those groups still exist, but are in the background of individual activities, even volunteering. Perhaps our activities today have a different impact when they are done across workplace, or faith communities?
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