I escaped my hometown of LA after getting laid off in the recession of 1991. This place blew my mind - how could a desert be so green and so achingly beautiful??? Plus there was no traffic!!! It was hot in summer, but the winters were cooler than LA. And for the 1st time in my life, I could visualize myself owning a piece of the dream: a condo - they were practically giving them away here at the end of '92. I got one for less than many people spend on a car. That world is Gone with the Wind. The traffic, the heat, the real estate prices (now falling back to earth), the imminent water catastrophe that nobody talks about - I can't blame everyone for coming here because they got priced out of their hometowns like I did. But to watch the systematic rape of the natural desert which was this location's finest quality - it's unbearable.
Plus socially here - since it's comprised mostly of newcomers and transplants - the extreme social stratification is something I find fairly obscene. One of my jobs puts me in the path of the ...how shall I put it...those people that are just so obscenely and smugly rich that the some distant genetic memory of "The Terror" starts running playbacks in my head when I'm forced to be around them. The 'insulated rich' that are served, and the regular working people that serve them have just a few fragile threads holding the two halves together as a community. It's a very shallow arrangement. The only real communities I have encountered here are those composed of genuine Arizona natives (one example is the Mormons, whom (I've now learned) are mostly really good people), or those communities of people who have moved en masse from other states and stuck together out here. Of course, I can only speak from my own limited perception.
I read today's "New Times" article
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2006-07-13/news/feature.html about the Katrina refugees who landed here. One thing that stuck out was that many of them said that they never realized they were so poor before they were forced out of New Orleans. You didn't need a car to get around there; there was an established sense of social courtesy - everybody says "Good Morning" and "Good Evening" when they pass each other on the street where they WALK (between May and now there has been a 25 incident random shooting spree here in Phoenix - every victim was someone on foot or on a bike, getting shot by people driving by in a car; who is going to walk anywhere to save energy with this kind of random violence? But I digress). People in NO have a history (one of the interviewees is from the Millon family - that name has a deep meaning in NO, but not here), when money's short in that community, the corner store gives you credit because they've known you for x number of years, or your neighbors bring over some red beans, and every Sunday the whole community participates in gatherings...talk about a rich community with very little cash. That's the polar opposite of life here.
I go back and forth over whether Phoenix is going to implode or not - I'd have to say that there are maybe enough people that are clued in to reality that Phoenix could have a chance --- providing the population shrinks to a reasonable size for the geography, and providing the community strengthens enough socially and politically to combat the corporate builders that control the dialog, decision-making and land use issues. :hi: I won't be here to help, I'm leaving at the end of the summer. But I'll be back to visit, because I'm rooting for this place even though I never managed to put down any real roots here. I'm energetically an ocean person - that's what my Sedona psychic told me. ;-) (She's right!)
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