A slice of American heaven
Quintin J. Reich
It usually happens that I wake up early in the morning, sometimes
before 6 a.m. The sound of the surf gently crashing on the shore
drifts in through our open window, calling me to life. I sneak out of
the house with my dog to say good morning to our little paradise by
the sea, and to my surprise, I am never alone.
Every morning, I see the same Japanese couple, ritually walking
their multiple lengths of the beach. Sometimes they walk together,
and sometimes they are many yards apart. But they are always there,
greeting the morning in their special way. One morning, there were
two young Asian girls sitting together at a portable piano, singing
some happy melody that I couldn’t quite make out.
I’ve seen a young, Native American couple dancing with drums and
shells that shook around their ankles. Their dance included a chant
that was powerful, moving and absolutely beautiful in the calm air of
dawn. Another woman, who must have been more than 60, danced alone,
almost in a waltz. She spiraled and twirled herself from one end of
the beach to the other and must have given herself a great workout. I
wasn’t sure if she was deliriously happy or seriously challenged by
reality.
Without fail, and irrespective of weather, dozens of Latino
families stake out their piece of grass, sand or rock that will be
their home for a day. It truly is amazing to see such a commitment to
family so widespread throughout one culture -- all before 6 a.m. As a
habitual morning person, it makes me feel almost slothful to see that
kind of industry and exuberance shine at such an early hour.
Of course, they probably look at me with my dog as one of the more
bizarre forms of life in the zoo. From their perspective, folks like
me, who follow around their four-legged friends to collect excrement
in little plastic bags, probably have no self-respect.
Climbing the steps home from Big Corona, I run into the real
fanatics. Every day, it’s the same thing. Some people hire personal
trainers to scream them into fitness, and some seemed motivated by
inner demons. They prance around in their Lycra shorts, jogger-bras
and designer sunglasses. They arrive in the most absurd gas guzzlers,
designed for some off-road adventure that will never come. They drive
up and down the streets for 10 or 15 minutes looking for parking
close enough to keep them from walking too far before their run. They
are the most conspicuously wasteful and the most environmentally
oblivious culture on the planet, and we live in their favorite gym.
Worse yet, it occurs to me after putting my sweaty Lycra in the wash,
as I drive my sport utility vehicle to work, I am them.
It would be no more an exaggeration to say that nearly 100% of the
exercise fanatics are white than it would be to say that nearly 100%
of the day-campers are either Asian or Latino. Rich white locals
don’t do the day-camper thing around here any more than their less
affluent, minority neighbors drive Hummers to go for a run. But
neither is more ridiculous than the other.
It makes me wonder what aliens from another planet would think if
they were to look down on us. They may or may not notice the color of
our skin, but they would certainly notice the actions of particular
groups. It’s not hard to imagine them saying something like: “The
ones with brown skin seem to be in charge. They get first pick of
available land, and therefore must be of a higher class. The white
ones in Lycra seem forced into physical labor and our scanners show
an inordinate amount of synthetic material enhancing their physical
appearance. This could only mean insecurity about their station in
life. And those poor slaves who have been relegated to picking up
after their four-legged masters, they must be in the lowest class of
all.”
This is really not too hard to imagine. Not the part about aliens
from other planets, but the idea of visitors misinterpreting the
cultural differences we claim to celebrate. Yes, I say “claim to
celebrate,” because, as much as I love the variety and the quality of
life here at the beach, I have to come home every day to the
side-effects of both. In fact, before sitting down to write this, I
noticed a soiled diaper outside my window. And since my wife and I
don’t have an infant living with us, nor do any of our immediate
neighbors, it’s safe to say that one of our visitors left it behind.
And I have to clean up after them.
Every morning, as I make my way down to the ocean for our run, I
see not only the various ingredients of our great American
melting-pot, I see all the garbage left behind from the night before.
They say that nobody takes care of your property as well as you, and
this is certainly true of our neighborhood. The people who live here
don’t put empty beer cans in your hedge, broken glass in your gutter
and dirty diapers on your lawn; the visitors do. Our quiet mornings
are not often disturbed by our neighbors driving by with their music
shaking the windows of our houses. That too is done by our visitors.
Does this make me a racist? I hope not, but it is the truth. And
if it’s the truth about Newport’s alleged or denied racism we’re
looking for, take a look at your CC&Rs.; At least one local
neighborhood, developed in the 1950s, felt it wasn’t a good idea to
sell homes to nonwhites. There’s even a paragraph prohibiting
nonwhites from spending the night at your house. So, for those of you
nonracist locals who have minority servants, please be sure send your
help home at the end of the day.
Yes, we live in a very beautiful place. We live in a resort town,
and people come from all over the state and all over the world to see
our little slice of American heaven. But we all have very different
habits, lifestyles and cultural practices. I’m not saying that one is
more offensive than the other. They are all good in some ways, and
all of them are bad in others. It certainly brings us locals no
pleasure to clean up after everyone else once they’ve had their fun
in our back yard. Neither, though, should it bring us any pride
knowing that we waste more of our planet’s resources than any other
culture on Earth, and therefore, have no right to complain about how
inconvenient it is to tolerate other cultures.
The challenges we face have to do more with doing the right things
than saying the right things. We cannot improve our track record by
denying that it’s bad. And we can no more afford to neglect our own
responsibilities than we can to criticize those who neglect theirs.
It would be nice to go to the beach one day without having to step
over the garbage others have left behind. But I’d also like to
compost, recycle and drive a solar-powered vehicle to work in the
morning. When I see my neighbor hosing off the alley behind his
house, wasting hundreds of gallons of California’s most precious
resource, I want to ask him to buy a broom. Instead, I go about my
business, often picking up dirty diapers along the way, and I try to
get my own house in order.
* QUINTIN J. REICH is a resident of Corona del Mar.
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