Oct. 21st, 2011 01:03 pm
No place like home
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textualdevianceAt the risk of irritating some ...
I admit that one of the reasons I love living in the PNW (the Western half, at least) is that we tend to be socially standoffish. We're exceptionally polite and compassionate, but not overtly friendly. It takes quite a long time to get a native (or near-native, like m'self) to warm up enough to socialize with regularly, and get close to. But the benefit of that is that once you do make it past the polite smiles and handshakes, the friendship you do get out of it is deeper and far more sincere than you might find elsewhere.
See, people are always talking about how legendarily friendly people are in the South and Midwest. They talk about how folks will bring casseroles to a new neighbor, chitchat in line at the grocery store, etc. People coming here from those environs tend to describe our local social customs as cold, at best, and perhaps even rude. (Our habit, for instance, of not RSVPing to social events until the last possible moment.)
But the difference is that the friendliness one tends to find in those other places only goes so far, because it's a custom borne of the safety of sameness.
Aside from racial divisions, most of the people one finds in these places tend to be pretty similar in terms of culture, values, worldview, etc. They may go to different churches, but they have the same general tenets of faith. They may vote for different candidates, but they have similar politics. The people in these places can afford to be friendly to strangers because the strangers in question usually aren't all that strange to them, when it comes down to it.
If someone actually IS strange, however? That friendliness not only dries up, but can turn into hostility in the blink of an eye. Queer folk, non-Christians, immigrants, etc. all tend to be incredibly isolated in these areas because that legendary friendly hospitality doesn't apply to them.
The irony in our culture here is that generally speaking, we won't reject people unless they're bigots. What little prejudice there is tends to come from transplants from elsewhere (or is directed at such--don't get us started on Californians.) We still have problems with racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.--it ain't Utopia--but in general, we can't afford to be bigoted because there isn't really enough of any one kind of us to oppress anyone else. The us-v-them stuff of other places rarely happens here because we don't easily organize into binary camps like that.* Try assuming the fellow white Christian guy next to you shares your prejudice against x, and you'll find out that his brother-in-law/boss/doctor/neighbor is x, and you've just scratched yerself from his Christmas card list.
It's true we're largely white folk here, but we don't have only one or two other dominant minority groups (AA & Latino) like you usually find elsewhere. It's true that generic Protestant is the majority religion, but we don't have a unified Catholic or Jewish presence, rather a major assortment of minor faiths and a significant minority of non-believers or people who are simply "meh" about religion. We don't have a huge Spanish-speaking population, but we have hundreds of thousands of people who are bilingual in dozens of other languages, from Arabic to Tagalog. Heck, we really don't even have much in the way of a gender divide here because few of our men and women are all that married to stereotypical gender roles. Even our sports fans and fashionistas aren't hardcore (and are likely as not to be the opposite of traditional gender for those things.) Truly, our only real dominant cultural groups here are queer folk, geeks and neo-hippies (and gay granola geeks. ;) )
But it's perhaps that level of diversity that leads to the polite-but-distant social code. We accept and coexist with thousands of people who are different from us in fairly significant ways, but when it comes to going further--getting from acquaintance to friend--it can be a little harder to find members of our own tribe, so to speak. It's like trying to find a match for an argyle sock when you're in a drawer full of argyle socks of similar colors and patterns. And because it takes a certain level of scrutiny to determine whether a similar pattern really is a match, we keep folks at arm's length until we know for sure. When we do find a match like that, however? We'll break out the U-Haul in less than a month. We know we've already done the necessary top-level sort if we're even socializing together, so the next step isn't as fraught with potential disaster.
So, yes, it's easier to feel isolated living here than it might be for people who easily fit in with the majority elsewhere. But the benefit is that the friendships we make here are much more satisfying than an insincere hug from some stranger in Texas might be. I've heard us described as the Northwest Mafia, and that's not entirely inaccurate. It's a damn hard time getting into a "family" but once you're in, you're in for life. Granted that if you screw up, that life's pretty damned short, but still. ;)
*The one binary social divide we do tend to have is economic class. We have many very, very rich people, but also many very, very poor ones. However, since 80% of the rich folks here are new money, and worked for it rather than inheriting it, there isn't the inherent disdain for the working class you find elsewhere. You can go to parties where one person shows up in a new Jag and parks it next to his buddy's 20-year-old Honda Civic, and people with some extra cash hanging around tend to spend it on their less-flush friends or donate a chunk of it to Northwest Harvest or an AIDS charity. Hell, we're the region that produced one of the world's richest men, who has a goal of giving away the vast majority of his fortune before he dies, rather than leaving it to his kids. How many other billionaires from elsewhere would do that?
I admit that one of the reasons I love living in the PNW (the Western half, at least) is that we tend to be socially standoffish. We're exceptionally polite and compassionate, but not overtly friendly. It takes quite a long time to get a native (or near-native, like m'self) to warm up enough to socialize with regularly, and get close to. But the benefit of that is that once you do make it past the polite smiles and handshakes, the friendship you do get out of it is deeper and far more sincere than you might find elsewhere.
See, people are always talking about how legendarily friendly people are in the South and Midwest. They talk about how folks will bring casseroles to a new neighbor, chitchat in line at the grocery store, etc. People coming here from those environs tend to describe our local social customs as cold, at best, and perhaps even rude. (Our habit, for instance, of not RSVPing to social events until the last possible moment.)
But the difference is that the friendliness one tends to find in those other places only goes so far, because it's a custom borne of the safety of sameness.
Aside from racial divisions, most of the people one finds in these places tend to be pretty similar in terms of culture, values, worldview, etc. They may go to different churches, but they have the same general tenets of faith. They may vote for different candidates, but they have similar politics. The people in these places can afford to be friendly to strangers because the strangers in question usually aren't all that strange to them, when it comes down to it.
If someone actually IS strange, however? That friendliness not only dries up, but can turn into hostility in the blink of an eye. Queer folk, non-Christians, immigrants, etc. all tend to be incredibly isolated in these areas because that legendary friendly hospitality doesn't apply to them.
The irony in our culture here is that generally speaking, we won't reject people unless they're bigots. What little prejudice there is tends to come from transplants from elsewhere (or is directed at such--don't get us started on Californians.) We still have problems with racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.--it ain't Utopia--but in general, we can't afford to be bigoted because there isn't really enough of any one kind of us to oppress anyone else. The us-v-them stuff of other places rarely happens here because we don't easily organize into binary camps like that.* Try assuming the fellow white Christian guy next to you shares your prejudice against x, and you'll find out that his brother-in-law/boss/doctor/neighbor is x, and you've just scratched yerself from his Christmas card list.
It's true we're largely white folk here, but we don't have only one or two other dominant minority groups (AA & Latino) like you usually find elsewhere. It's true that generic Protestant is the majority religion, but we don't have a unified Catholic or Jewish presence, rather a major assortment of minor faiths and a significant minority of non-believers or people who are simply "meh" about religion. We don't have a huge Spanish-speaking population, but we have hundreds of thousands of people who are bilingual in dozens of other languages, from Arabic to Tagalog. Heck, we really don't even have much in the way of a gender divide here because few of our men and women are all that married to stereotypical gender roles. Even our sports fans and fashionistas aren't hardcore (and are likely as not to be the opposite of traditional gender for those things.) Truly, our only real dominant cultural groups here are queer folk, geeks and neo-hippies (and gay granola geeks. ;) )
But it's perhaps that level of diversity that leads to the polite-but-distant social code. We accept and coexist with thousands of people who are different from us in fairly significant ways, but when it comes to going further--getting from acquaintance to friend--it can be a little harder to find members of our own tribe, so to speak. It's like trying to find a match for an argyle sock when you're in a drawer full of argyle socks of similar colors and patterns. And because it takes a certain level of scrutiny to determine whether a similar pattern really is a match, we keep folks at arm's length until we know for sure. When we do find a match like that, however? We'll break out the U-Haul in less than a month. We know we've already done the necessary top-level sort if we're even socializing together, so the next step isn't as fraught with potential disaster.
So, yes, it's easier to feel isolated living here than it might be for people who easily fit in with the majority elsewhere. But the benefit is that the friendships we make here are much more satisfying than an insincere hug from some stranger in Texas might be. I've heard us described as the Northwest Mafia, and that's not entirely inaccurate. It's a damn hard time getting into a "family" but once you're in, you're in for life. Granted that if you screw up, that life's pretty damned short, but still. ;)
*The one binary social divide we do tend to have is economic class. We have many very, very rich people, but also many very, very poor ones. However, since 80% of the rich folks here are new money, and worked for it rather than inheriting it, there isn't the inherent disdain for the working class you find elsewhere. You can go to parties where one person shows up in a new Jag and parks it next to his buddy's 20-year-old Honda Civic, and people with some extra cash hanging around tend to spend it on their less-flush friends or donate a chunk of it to Northwest Harvest or an AIDS charity. Hell, we're the region that produced one of the world's richest men, who has a goal of giving away the vast majority of his fortune before he dies, rather than leaving it to his kids. How many other billionaires from elsewhere would do that?
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