Purple America
On a recent drive from Pasadena to Sacramento, I had to stop for gas around the midway point of Kettleman City, California, which is little more than a one-block way station for truckers and travelers. Gas stations conspire for the highest prices the market will bear and fast food restaurants advertise 99 cent specials to attract weary drivers’ attention.
While I was filling the tank on my fuel-sipping Toyota Matrix, a commotion erupted as an SUV came to an abrupt stop. An angry station manager came charging out of his bullet-proof booth to confront the thoroughly perplexed driver. She had pulled away from the pump without removing the gas hose from her tank and the hose, yanked from its moorings, was snaking behind her trailing a stream of gasoline. For a moment I feared a real life replay of the gasoline fight in the movie Zoolander, in which a trio of male supermodels are incinerated after someone flicks a stray cigarette butt . Nearly in tears, the SUV driver spat out embarrassed apologies while the manager who’d thought he’d seen it all now had.
And I thought to myself: Ain’t that America. Maybe she was just tired from the long drive or distracted by the kids clamoring in the back seat. More likely, she was shell-shocked by the cost of feeding her four-wheeled behemoth.
But this was an unusual act from a typical American. Aren’t so many of us stressing through life, barely managing to get from one place to another?
California, which anchors the left coast of the electoral map in blue, is really a golden state of purple. The leftist loonies that inhabit La-La Land and the Frisco Bay aren’t the dominant figures in California or national politics. Geographically speaking, they are the minority, inhabiting densely-packed islands of cobalt in an otherwise reddish sea.
California is America, in many ways its future but in other ways its past. Californians still believe in the dream of a little patch of land, a family house just like its neighbors’ in a cookie-cutter development; a big car for schlepping kids from above-average schools to soccer; a decent job; and a life for their children that is slightly better than their own. They’ve bought the SUVs and little pink houses in far-flung suburbs because that’s what they’ve been sold.
It’s easy for me to make fun of these simple-minded rubes because aren’t I making fun of myself? I grew up in blue collar Ohio. My current residence, Pasadena, now home to family legacies and nouveau riche entrepreneurs, was initially named by its Midwestern founders as the Indiana Colony. Wherever I travel throughout the state I meet fellow Midwestern transplants. There’s a reason why we feel at home here. These are our people. We share the same set of values that include hard work, a sense of fair play, concern for our fellow men and women and the unshakable feeling that tomorrow will be OK.
If America is a divided nation, it is because our political leaders gain leverage by dividing us. Yet our nation’s strength is the middle-class of Middle America. Those who built this nation should be given the tools to build our future — high quality school systems, affordable health insurance, lower taxes and freedom from political leaders’ ill-informed intentions.
The barren stretch of land along Interstate 5 that separates the bastions of blue is the common ground between all of us.
December 2, 2007 at 6:43 am
I recently saw a woman driving a Ford SUV hand signal to a paramedic bus driver in the Whole Foods (s/b, Whole Fools?) parking lot to allow her to pass before the bus took off to the hospital with its patient, already in the back of the bus. She had spied a parking spot near the bus and wanted to sneak in before one of the others. waiting patiently in line for the emergency vehicle to pass and the pathway to clear, could steal the precious spot from her. Sound like a fictional episode of Seinfeld, or do we see a pattern here?