Local Control in suburbia

 

Local control

It's interesting how seriously people take their investment in a community as directly proportional to the number of years lived there. What does this say? One thing is about ownership of territory... it's about a sense of entitled power and control. Entitled locals tend to also have white privilege, be property owners, and typically unite against development, and are anti-growth.  

 

If you're not on the territorial conqueror team, if you’re a renter or BIPOC renter, you can't wield power, you have no control, your place in the community is on shifting sand, you're a permanent outsider.

 

At the end of the day, US history provides us with a mix and tension of parochialism and freedom to move and change, all based on a forgotten initial conquest that dispossessed the real locals, the Natives. Today, inward-turned homebodies nationwide protect their fences against the Kerouc-Kesey energy of adventure, the brash, the new, the transplants, the climate migrants, the politically persecuted: against change. No painting your house purple allowed, in many ways! Once people land and literally buy in, they tend to want to join the locals burn the bridge from whence they came. Anything new becomes threatening, a lot like the Stepford Wives.

 

Robert Pirsig's lesser-known book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals dove into this topic head on with a fun analysis of Dynamic and Static Quality. The Static is the Sonoma Valley Sleepy Hollow Stasis... isn't it great here! Let's do all we can to protect it! Stasis defenders are then transformed into warriors of the status quo, every threat of change a new pitched battle, the raceway, the UGB, a hotel, the Hanna project, the County Housing Element, an Amazon distribution center.

 

The only problem? The aggregate effect of static parochialism is no new ideas are allowed and that the servants of the great life are not allowed in, or only under draconian conditions like the immigrant Qatari workers building that soccer stadium. Drive on the streets behind La Luz to see what I mean.

 

To access the good life here, all manner of barriers abound. There’s no room at the Inn. Want to question the stasis? Comments closed. If you’re not in the homeowner conqueror class, and have not been here for x number of years, tough luck. The hard moat around this area runs all prices up sky high. Protection = inflation = exclusion.    

 

The unseemly underbelly of the great Sonoma Valley Sleepy Hollow Stasis is entitled hubris and segregation, now justified by a liberal coding that transmogrifies social exclusion into a noble fight to save the world against environmental destruction. Those "too many people", those too many rats, they become objectified, expendable commodities to be excluded from the hallowed territory, excluded as members of “the community.” Good enough to build, paint, and clean your house and yard, not good enough to be a neighbor or to have an equally valid narrative to guide our collective future.

 

People protect territory with a passion like no other, this is why Sleepy Hollow NIMBYs are so animated and endlessly energized to fight, and why everyone is for inclusion of essential workers, just somewhere else than in our territory. Protected territory is, after all, stasis, security, a hedge against mortality, a bulwark against the cold winds of Fate and Change that we all have coming.

 

Any comments to the contrary, on SDC, Hanna, the Plaza hotel… not allowed unless you’ve literally bought in and lived here for a minimum of 15 years? In this formulation, no non-conqueror-class comments and narratives are ever legitimate. Why? Because renters have no local control, the whole house of cards is stacked against them.   

 

Anyone seeking a crack in the entryway to Sleepy Hollow here will find 1000 passionate reasons why not to let them in. That's a local control from residents who have elbowed their way into the role of gatekeepers against change. Who can prosper by freezing dynamic change and by excluding the worker bees (renters) as valued locals and insiders? As Jared Diamond said in his book Collapse: Why Civilizations Choose to Succeed or Fail, all the wealthy and entitled buy themselves is the privilege of dying last. 

 

https://www.sonomanews.com/article/opinion/commentary-how-long-have-you-lived-in-sonoma/