Empty Nesters on a Green Global Trek

One thinks of cultural shock as being something one experiences upon arrival in an exotic, foreign land.

For us, having lived outside the U.S. for the past seven years, adjusting  to life in America has resulted in an unexpected level of culture shock. America IS a foreign land!

For me, (PK) some of the feelings are a strong deja vu / jolt back to when I first came to live in America from South Africa as an adventurous 19 year old, leaving my family and home country to live in a distant foreign land for a year.

What is interesting about our adjustment is that two nomadic friends of ours happen to be back in the U.S. at the same time as we are ~ (Monica whom we met in Nicaragua and then reconnected with in India, and Jennifer whom we met on a beach in Thailand.) Both are originally from Chicago and both are experiencing many of the same aspects of culture shock as we are. It is affirmation enough that it is not “just us.”

 #1: THE GUN thing

We stop in our tracks, shocked when we see our first “no guns” sticker in the window of a coffee shop.

Whaaattt?? Seriously?

The explanation, we are told, is that since Illinois passed legislation that allows people to carry concealed weapons, the sticker is a way to communicate the preference for  stores or restaurants or buildings to be gun free.

Walking down our street a few days ago, we pass a man with a very visible gun in a belt holster. Talk about the Wild Wild West!

To keep it short ~ the NRA is stronger and more powerful than ever. Even the shocking and tragic killings of innocent children in a school a few years ago was not enough to create change in this strange love of guns and the notion that people want to protect themselves in accordance with the 2^nd amendment.

The complacency that many Americans have over the fact that people are walking around armed is rather bewildering. Not to mention the high number that get shot. The statistics are numbing.

Chicago has a terrible record of violence and gun accidents, one of the worst in the nation. 1,300 shooting victims in the first 6 months of 2015! 1 out of 3 homes in Chicago have a gun. And yet the facts speak for themselves ~ for every ONE person killed in a self defense scenario, another 35 people die from their own gun, whether due to accident, suicide, or attack on a third party. And yet… the NRA records the highest year of gun sales on record.

The “culture wars” may have reached some resolution in terms of same sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana, but on the subject of gun ownership ~ it remains a bizarre universe.  Try bringing up the topic of gun ownership in social gatherings and it quickly degenerates into absurd discussions about the 2nd amendment, mostly on the part of people who have never even read the Constitution and its many Amendments or some specious argument about the importance of being able to maintain self defense against a future US government ~ Right, that would be against a military force that has drones, armored vehicles and a host of technologies that render a typical gun owner’s private arsenal laughingly irrelevant.

#2 : Americans are unpredictable and fearful.

On arriving in a new country, we quickly develop a sense of our own “ease of interaction” with locals. Abstract the issue of language, which is seldom a significant variable, we usually get a pretty reliable early sense of how “friendly” the locals will be.

For example, (based our 6 years living in Nicaragua) most Nicaraguans… 90% if not more, are “friendly”. A warm and positive disposition is the culture and “friendly” is the default mode in their interaction. Most Muslims we have met in Sri Lanka and in Indonesia were friendly.

Our experience in Chicago so far is that Americans are, well… very unpredictable. Some people are very friendly and some are rather hostile. Ya never really know…..  Do we meet friendly people? ~ yes, everyday, especially dog owners. But for every friendly encounter, it seems we have an unsettling encounter with stressed out, sharp tongued or rude folks who lash out in the most surprising ways.

Most of the children we have encountered here in public, on the streets, in parks and buses, are consistently unfriendly. (Except for Latino children who are more likely to engage in some conversation or answer a hi with a hi.) Perhaps the rest of them have been warned by their parents NOT to talk to strangers and so they do not, even though their parents are right with them. It’s rather strange.

There is a new movement in America called “Free Range Parenting” and “free range children”. (Yup, not chickens, but children.)  We made a point of looking into this issue of safety and it turns out that, factually, America is safer than it was fifty years ago for children, but the perception (mostly due to social media) is that it is an increasingly  dangerous place.  (In a surprising recent case, in Maryland, parents were placed under investigation by Child Protective Services for allowing their 6 and 10 year old children to walk home alone from their neighborhood park.)

 #3 phones absolutely RULE

When we first arrived, I (PK) did not have a phone. In fact I have not had a phone for the past five years or so. I have an ipad, I have email and I have skype. Who the hell needs a phone?

Not having a phone is total freedom.

But in America, EVERYONE has a phone and not only that, everyone is always looking at and using their phone constantly. After a few weeks I finally relented and got a phone, as I realized what an absolute necessity it is here and how texting is the main way that people communicate.

I knocked at my neighbors door and was greeted with “Oh how charming, you just came over to chat, without texting or calling first…” Was he being sarcastic? Nope, turned out he really thought it was novel and charming. I now know that people text before they come over and they text when they are on their way and when they arrive.. or something like that.

I overheard a woman at the phone store, saying she had lost her phone “The worst thing that could ever happen… I may as well die.” Yup, they all agreed, nothing could be worse in life than her having lost her phone!

I (Ben) stood next to a man in Walgreens who spoke out loud while he checked his weather app    “I wonder if its raining today?” ~ Typing furiously, mumbling something about yesterday’s prediction of a high probability of rain. This is in a large building with a huge ceiling atrium ~ I tapped his shoulder and suggested that he might, well just lift up his head and look out the window. “Yup, it is pouring. You don’t need your app to tell you that! ” He seemed surprised, said thanks, and continued typing to CONFIRM that his app told him it was raining..

There is one of the best bars in Chicago down the road that people love, and of the reasons they love it is that ~ phones aren’t allowed. Brief freedom from the constant connectivity.

#4 RACISM

We purposely chose a neighborhood that is diverse and mixed. Wicker Park is a mix of black, white, Hispanic, young, old, hetero, LGBT everything goes… There are often social groups doing fund raising in the streets, and one of these groups is called “Black Lives Matter.” Wow! A movement had to be created in order to get this message across.

One only needs to read the news within a one week span to understand that America has a terrible problem still today with racism. It is widespread and runs deep and is reflected in tragic shootings by white officers, tragic shootings in a church, all based on color of skin.

It all seems oh so very abstract and yes everyone knows that racism remains a strong cultural attribute of our fellow Americans.  Yet one of the values of living in a mixed neighborhoods is that you get to experience first hand this cultural reality.  Nothing is abstract here ~ today, in the park, we see 6 policemen and women zero in on one particular individual.

He is an African American and boisterous and… funny! We have met him several times in the past  as he “works the neighborhood” as an artist and singer. The six police officers encircle him, two fairly bulky white cops keep their hands on their gun holster.

We are sitting in the grass and, since we “know him” and can see at a distance that there is a potential scene in the making, we approach. Ben goes and greets the black guy, acknowledging him as a neighbor. But the main cop, hand on holster wants to drive him out of the park. There has been a complaint, he says, about this guy harassing people in the park. Ridiculous ~ we have seen him,  “working the crowd”, usually to broad smiles and laughter.

Still, the main cop continues to push for some resolution, and asks “Do you need help to go to a hospital?”

“For what?”, answers the guy, taking off his shirt to show his Bruce Lee like body as he starts doing 50 push ups in front of the overweight white cop.

“Can you do that? Maybe YOU need to go to the hospital?” he says, with a laugh ~ to the amusement of the other 5 cops.

The point of the anecdote ~ in the context of a deteriorating relationship between the police and the population after multiple rounds of verified police excess of force, we had a first row seat at a situation that could easily have escalated. Ben puts his arm around the “offensive” black guy and encourages him to walk away… “It’s bad use of taxpayer money”, blurts the man… “Yeah okay” says Ben, “but they have guns… just walk away, de-escalate…” (Meanwhile, Peta was berating the white guy who called the cops, asking him whether he would have called the cops if the guy had been white.)

Memories flood back to my (PK) earliest memories of America at age 19, having left South Africa, a country sieged by Apartheid to arrive in Miami, just when black and white riots  erupted ~ 2 months after my arrival.

There is a seething racism that is overt, covert and is palpable.

Not saying there is not racism in other parts of the world. Of course there is.

We really feel it here, jus sayin’.

#5 High cost of living.

The fall of the middle class is apparent in America as more rise to become wealthier and more and more drop to the poverty line.

We see more beggars on the street in Chicago (and other cities, Washington D.C. , San Francisco) than we ever saw in Nicaragua ~ a country that is the second poorest in the Western hemisphere, after Haiti.

Gap stores are closing fast and furious… Why is this relevant? It is, because they marketed themselves as appealing to the middle. Not too expensive, not cheap. Statistics show that Americans today are either spending heaps of money on designer clothes, or are buying low cost clothing. The middle market is dropping away.

Again, the diminishing of the Middle Class may sound like the stuff one hears on the campaign trail.  We are getting a sense that it is a much larger segment of the population that today has to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet.  The gap between the “American Dream” as portrayed in the media and the obsession with “celebrities” and their consumption pattern has created an unbridgeable chasm between desire and reality.  No wonder the American population is the most medicated in human history!  (Nope, we won’t go on a rant about the concentration of power in the hands of the pharmaceutical and agro-industry!)

SO… these are somewhat harsh words that try to categorize a general sense of “Culture Shock”.

Of course, we know that in no time, these odd behaviors will become “normal” and we will join  our fellow Americans in their definition of the norm.  These cultural differences will recede, just as cultural differences about eating with your hands in Sri Lanka, taking your shoes off before entering a home in most of Asia, and swimming in the sea fully dressed in Nicaragua, became oh so normal.

We wanted to capture these fleeting moments of incredulity at our surroundings.  Soon we will be “one of them”.  (Witness ~ we now don’t raise an eyebrow at a $10 raw pressed fruit juice! Something that was unfathomable and hard to accept just 3 months ago).