An America Fading from View - Boomer to Bust
The uber picks me up to take me to my first vaccination. The driver is a young black man from the Congo who tells me he is a Christian. His mother is still in Africa. His Aunt in New York. He went to Liberty University. He says he is here to be a missionary to Americans.
The mall parking lot is almost empty as he drops me off. This was once a JCPenney. Now, it is almost entirely empty. The shells of departments and brands are still here, but the carcass of this bastion of American utopia is now taken over by the National Guard and teams of elderly nurses.
It’s a dystopian scene, yet the vitality in the room is distinctly American: upbeat, optimistic, a breezy, happy confidence in being able to overcome all things. There is a palpable energy in the room, an excitement even. America is getting people vaccinated against COVID.
I’m directed to a desk, where a member of the National Guard in camouflage looks over my ID. He is one of those Americans in their 20s with perfectly symmetrical features, white teeth, thick hair and an accent from the movies. It turns out he is German and only became an American citizen some weeks before. He tells me to take Lane 2.
The nurses, all of them close to or beyond retirement age, are so pleased to be helping, so friendly, so seasoned. They take an interest in where I work as I roll up my t-shirt sleeve, looking away, and it’s done. These sweet women, seemingly enjoying their part in a national mobilization of the most colossal and ambitious proportions. One directs me to the observation area. Two sixty year old men stand in chinos and shirts by a trestle table with water bottles, handing them out to participants in this marathon. I take my bottle, my vaccinated sticker, and sit on the socially distanced seats. I slip an Advil, sip water, and look around the empty department store, at an alcove where jeans and polo shirts would have hung. There’s no doubt that this country is changing, and I wonder if it’s generational. This whole process was so quick, so efficient, it makes me tear up just writing about it. It feels like an America I knew but is fast slipping from view.
The reason it’s so stark to me is because that same week I had been to both a coffee shop and a restaurant that were local and independent. If there is one observation I’ve made since moving to Charlottesville, Virginia, it’s that those who see themselves as progressive, tolerant, and inclusive generally aren’t any of those things. At an independent coffee shop the food tends to be overpriced. I am serving them. Curiously, I am asked to provide a 25% tip before anything’s even produced. They are angry, hostile, and homogenous. There will be a striped flag or BLM sign brandished somewhere as a declaration of an inclusivity they see as redefining an intolerant country. We are charged $50 for a croque monsieur and drink for two.
But on another day we go to McDonalds for breakfast as a family. The overwhelming, striking contrast when you walk in, compared to the independent coffee shop, is the diversity of staff and customers. Black and white people are preparing and serving the food together. Black and white people are eating the food. The focus is on selling you food, to make it quick. It arrives. It’s really affordable. It’s actually pretty good. The coffee cup encourages you to get a vaccine—‘we can do this’ or some such printed on the side. The black woman who brings us our hotcakes says my daughter is really cute and gives her a toy car. She’s hooked. Pancakes, syrup, fruit, and a free toy. She plays with it still.
Several weeks later, I return to the JCPenney. It’s still empty. The parking lot is still cratered. I think of the one or two Christmases I spent with my mom in Colorado Springs not even twenty years ago, great troops of dissatisfied gift recipients returning everything in a frenzy of exchange on December 26, parking lots rammed with cars and dangerously loaded pedestrians. This abandoned lot couldn’t be any more different. Cars spotted about. An absence really of anyone to see. I arrive at the doors. There’s a man in his 60s there to greet and direct, ‘Covid vaccine?’ There’s no National Guard this time.
A black woman greets me with a wide smile and sparkling eyes. I’ve been given a green piece of paper which tells her where I am meant to go. “I love your accent, are you from England?” Then her face sinks, she looks terrified. The words have slipped out of her mouth. She doesn’t wait for my answer but instead stares past me at the person not behind me.
She has committed a microagression: by referencing my accent she has made me feel ‘other’ed. This is a sad exchange. Hasn’t she really just celebrated my diversity?
Everything else is the same. I sip my free plastic bottle of water. There is less enthusiasm in the room this time, but the efficiency is still there. There is a sense of crisis being averted, but also a sort of gloom.
As I think of the simple joy, the pleasant camaraderie of the nurses at the deceased JCPenney mall, I see an America that is in danger of being in fast retreat. The retirement of boomers, their own comfort and ease with themselves instead being replaced by a shrill, Marxist culture of intolerance and witch-hunting: a people deeply uncomfortable with themselves, the country and privileges they’ve inherited, and with a profound discomfort with their fellow citizens.
America is moving into the hands of those who do not see democracy as a means to protect the individual from the government, but rather who see the government as there to protect individuals from each other. From can-do to can’t.
I think about the multi-million dollar historic mansions sat in sumptuous grounds along the best street in this city with “Housing justice is racial justice” signs adorning their manicured front yards. The five bedroom home with one, now two Teslas on the front drive as a woman pulls up and empties her trunk of Whole Foods groceries for the weekend. She walks past her “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” sign on her fence without the slightest hint of irony.
But maybe I exaggerate. Maybe the vocal minority and their absurd hypocrisies are taking up too much space in my head.
I visit a Chik-Fil-A. An American flag flaps and licks the crystal sky, the Blue Ridge Mountains a brushstroke on the horizon. The young people working here have a great work ethic: they want to serve, want to do a great job, want to host you at their restaurant, working hard to get you a delicious chicken burger in a really clean environment, before they clock off and do whatever it is they want to do with their lives. In the meantime, some lyric-less contemporary Christian worship music plays, and families gather to eat before they go to the football game, wearing their University of Virginia paraphernalia. It’s so wholesome: this America that is so confident, so enjoyable, so diverse, the envy of nations in its effortless, simple pleasure and ease.
This country’s incredible strength is its optimism, its buoyancy, its can-do. To have three hundred and thirty million people of the most staggering array of backgrounds working and living together across a continent with a shared national culture is an immense accomplishment. There may be a cohort of next generation Americans fresh to voting age whose activism feels more like an obsessive compulsive disorder; that seeks to refold society into an order that relieves their anxieties. To that, all I would say is that this kind of parochial introspection and vigilant self-examination might be fine in a local coffee shop appealing to the similarly neurotic. It’s silly and varied hypocrisy a tolerable function of free speech in a blue enclave. But it is not a way for a whole society to be made to live.
