03.11.26
A Brief ReflectionI have spent my whole life within the borders of United States, except once, and I certainly wouldn't count that - it was a gaudy cruise expedition that my grandmother had generously brought my family along for. We landed in Mexico, but the Mexico we experienced was a consumer-facing theatrical enactment of the adventurers' preconceived expectations. It was an afternoon's worth of tourist attractions. There were flashes of Mexico landscape and citizens between bits of economy that depended entirely upon the tourist's eager wallet. When we were boarding the cruise ship at the end of the day, I felt as though we had never really left the confines of its hulking circus after all.
I grew up in a part of rural North Carolina where every remote corner seemed to hide a Baptist church, where run-down ivy-covered mobile homes would cozy up next to gated communities with pristine green square acres leading to every front door, and where a large population of Spanish-speaking residents lived, many of whom worked in manual labor for underpaying employers or found work at dreary-grey apparitions of warehouses that towered above the dewy, arid landscape.
When I was fourteen years old, we left fourteen acres of North Carolina deer-hunting, adventuring, livestock land for a big house with a small yard in Loudoun County, Virginia. My dad had landed a teaching gig at a small college in the area. Leaving was difficult, but I have realized that while I felt connected to North Carolina in a lot of ways, my cultural experience there was a rather distinct one. Our house was a safe-haven from the outside world. Our home-school co-op, met within the secure walls of a properly gospel believing church. Our friends were strictly like-minded families with numerous children like us, so every sibling had a playmate. It seemed that upon the event that we required groceries or a trip to the salon, a different culture from our own occupied the very air we breathed. The culture became an adversity for a hero to defeat; a chivalrous crusade to the nearest grocer. My parents had created their own culture for us; a fact appreciable for the closeness it brought my siblings, my parents, and myself, while also inappreciable for the isolation it bore, whether I realized or not, from the majority of the society surrounding us. But I do not desire to make it seem that my parents are inhospitable people. On the contrary, my parents have always been very hospitable to friends and strangers and everyone in between and as a result, I have a deep-seated training for radical hospitality.
After moving, I experienced a culture shock. Even within the ostensibly familiar bubbles that the Christian home schoolers occupied. Every neighborhood was packed full of money, every high schooler packed full of activities, and every father worked for a high-security position in some branch of the government - DC was just a 2 hour commute, of course. What your dad did for a living wasn't a legally answerable question, and the roads east to DC were packed full of choleric commuters by 6 a.m. every day. The very sidewalks were infused with the sense of urgency that drove every heel clacking across their barren faces. The almost religious rituals of profession that this society practiced were not completely unfamiliar, but at an intense volume that I had never experienced before. And as we moved, all of us changed. I think we have changed a lot.