Just pretending it’s all good…

Returning to Saint Louis in my thirties has been blessed and challenging. My hometown is just like I remembered it, and different. I’m aware of more animals sharing the land with me, and the drivers here tailgate more than in my memory even in my own neighborhood as though rendering neighborliness a thing of the past. Nevertheless, the weather’s still a combination of temperamental and exciting: humid summers followed by cozy falls, cold winters without the brutal chill of cities like Chicago, and springtime when the fresh air is buzzing with song. I don’t know if most St. Louis natives are aware of their precious air quality. That and the visual dynamism of the sky here are absolutely some of my favorite things about life itself. The fact that admission to the St. Louis Art Museum is free along with other public spaces is pretty nice as well. I love that nothing’s ever ridiculously crowded. There’s space at every coffee shop, library and restaurant on most days (excluding First Watch restaurant on Mother’s Day). Most neighborhoods have a kind of quaint, quiet atmosphere that I eventually became desperate for while living across the East Bay, California. When you fall asleep in the suburbs, you hear the sound of the train, the wind moving through the trees, cricket choirs, and even on occasion, particularly after a snowfall: precious silence. These are the reasons I love my hometown. 

I’m typically not shy to admit the things I find less favorable about living in St. Louis, but perhaps I’ve become shyer. I’ve noticed that whenever someone shares an unfavorable opinion of St. Louis to a St. Louis native, they become strangely defensive about “their city” as though it’s no longer “your city” by the simple fact that you’ve dared reveal any possible setbacks of living here. I believe in being positive and optimistic, but I don’t believe in indulging half-truths or lies. I don’t enjoy criticizing St. Louis by any means. I understand there are times when an honest views are best shared, and others when they’re best kept private. It’s when criticism is never tolerated however that the collective imagination of a place suffers. It’s when a people or group collectively assigns unfailing supremacy to something that the bar for excellence is lowered.

The food in St. Louis is okay. The public transit is terrible. The emphasis on drinking culture among both youth and adults is overdone and sad. The downtown is small, which I don’t mind, except it’s separated from the rest of the city by neighborhoods characterized by vacant houses stained with decades of neglect. There’s still a cultural war going on between Protestants and Catholics that I don’t understand. Each group is perpetually horrified by the other though blood is no longer spilled over it. Worst of all, there’s a lack of cosmopolitan identity in so far as the “city” sits spread out over so much land. This leads to a lack of exposure which can result in less tolerance, less curiosity, and less appreciation for diversity. When you have groups of people, particularly home owners who’ve resolved to root in one place for a while, living in neighborhoods where little is reachable without a car and conversing with the television sometimes multiple times a day, reality starts to look a little odd. There’s an aftertaste of monotony that suppresses. 

As high schoolers, we partied not because we were “bad kids”. Most of us were dedicated to sports and received good grades. We were bored. There was nothing for high school students to do on the weekends beyond gathering in basements. Sure, we went to the movies a few times a month. But there’s only so much sitting back and watching other people’s lives you can take before you need to move your own bones and create your own adventure. Only, there was nowhere to adventure to — except basements and backyards where you were forced to be sneaky because after all how dare you in your teenage years be too loud and take up space at night, as if being good were reserved for quietness and daytime alone.

Maybe adults experience a similar frustration as the youth with living here — only they’ve become better at denial. Drinking culture after all was passed down to us from adults. I can’t count all of the times I witnessed my friends’ parents drunk on Friday and Saturday nights in elementary and middle school. With empty wine bottles covering their dining room tables, they’d let slip their most private thoughts to their daughters like “If it weren’t for you kids, I’d leave your dad”. They’d force their children to give them a kiss in front of a room full of laughing, belligerent idiots. One of the richest dads in our school parish once drove us home with open bottles of beer in the car and purposefully swerved in his lane, pretending to be more intoxicated than he “really was”. What was their end game? What were they after? What is anyone trying to do on a Friday or Saturday night? They were after a good time. Only they were shamelessly irresponsible and later somehow surprised when we copied them.

When you have to ingest a mind-altering substance to have fun and feel good, you become susceptible to a lie: that everything is good. The main problem with this lie is that it requires intoxication. You must continually alter your mind via drinking and drugs to keep up the belief that everything is fine otherwise you must come to terms with the fact that life in the suburbs is at best safe, comfortable, and relaxed and at worst: lonesome, shallow, and dull.

One beautiful thing about a sober mind is that you’re more apt to honestly admit the things you don’t like about your life. And it’s when you can admit you don’t like something that you can begin the work of changing things. You can tap into your agency. No, not your agency to copy what the generation before you did: opening another beer or getting high and wobbly. You can get creative, break out of your shell, risk a little judgment from the neighbors and start a community garden, a prayer or meditation group, a free public library, a community art space, whatever!

I’m reminded of a time I briefly worked at a local shop in Oakland, California, during the pandemic. Just a few months into the role, I was already exhausted by the entitled customers. The arguments people would have with the owner over the prices. The man who told me not to sit down too much while working the front desk because it would “flatten my ass”. Worse, there was a man who once asked me how my day was going. I typically focused on the positive as “pleasant” cashiers do, but for some reason that day, I hesitated as though I was finally ready to let the world in on a little, big secret: that I was having a bad day. 

“Just say it’s going well,” he said, rolling his eyes. 

His irritation with me was palpable. I don’t remember how I responded. I just remember the disappointment I felt at witnessing with such immediacy just how unwelcome my honesty was to this stranger who’d asked about my day. People want what they want; it doesn’t matter if it’s “true” or authentic. They just have to believe it enough for “it” to feel real. The man was there to make a purchase, and apparently that purchase did not involve a genuine conversation with the cashier. 

Politics works in a similar way. It doesn’t matter if a politician is actually who they say they are. What matters is how their message resonates with their voting base. It doesn’t matter if their message is real or achievable; if it’s believable, then it’s as good as real. Political messages often work to weave messaging through the public zeitgeist that pretends to solve for societal inefficiencies, inequities, and incompetence before the politician has even taken office. After all, where there’s hope, the obstacles of everyday life become easier to face and bear.

Throughout the majority of human history, the freedom to critique power and authority has not been enjoyed by the masses, and where democracy hangs by a thread to maintain its integrity, such a freedom requires more effort to secure. Democracies call for a certain skepticism of governing bodies. Thriving democracies do not tolerate blind optimism, encouraging instead a fearless confrontation with inconvenient truths from political corruption to social injustices and collapsing avenues for upward mobility. 

It’s dangerous when political parties, both politicians and constituents, claim to be the most “American” while propping up a story of the United States as the supreme nation of nations as the backdrop of their political message. The result is the likening of dissenters to ungrateful, unpatriotic traitors out to destroy the country entirely. When our education and healthcare system are fundamentally broken at the core, when full-time workers can’t afford a place to live let alone a home, when the shelters are flooded with more requests than they can provide for, when corporate interests dictate the direction of modern politics and greed dominates, there’s much worth critiquing. The United States is a country born of dissent as much as determination, discipline, and dreams. 

We must be careful when people — neighbors and politicians — ask us to pretend everything’s okay when it’s not. With optimistic hearts we must be willing to identify what we wish were different so as to know what needs improvement in order to build a better world.