November 2000

Weird things everywhere seen

From pierced fingernails dangling a hoop and a charm to supermarket parking lots displaying dirty diapers without fail, I feel some days that I’ve seen the odder pieces of the real America. But then something bigger hits me and everything else fades into the distance.

Today on the bus I passed a golf course in the middle of the city – right across the street from a row of partly abandoned homes! Has no one else found this strange? The haven of wealthy and "up and coming" suburbanites brought face to face with the part of the city that their far-flung gated communities wholeheartedly reject. A picture of two opposite factions of our culture staring at each other right in the middle of Baltimore.

Our cities typically afford us a view of the class divide personified, yet these are more transient images, not fixed structures raising their respective flags. A woman, her newly purchased $200 shirt delicately placed in the bottom of a large shopping bag, emerges from Brooks Brothers and steps past a man wearing pants he found in a dumpster – wearing them for the seventeenth day straight despite the foul and unmistakable brown which has soiled his entire seat. That is a picture not only odd but disturbing. Yet it disturbs very few. Anyone spending time in the city witnesses it many times each day.

That is perhaps the oddest piece of America. How unfazed we are. How unobservant. Nothing can be stranger than that. Nothing. Not even seeing thousands of pierced fingernails or never buying groceries without stepping over at least one used diaper.