Here Be Monsters

I've noticed recently that my neighbors next door to me, the white ones, I never get to see. They are essentially yuppies living in a gentrifying neighborhood. My other neighbors, who are African-American, I see on a regular basis, and occasionally I wave and say hello to them while I'm out on the porch smoking a cigarette. In fact, I never see any of the white people on my street. They leave and come home through their garages on the alley. The snow on their front walk is not even trodden upon for weeks. If you were to put my own neighbors in a police lineup, I would certainly not be able to pick them out.

Then again, this is what I'm used to. I used to live in Lexington, SC, which I endearingly call "suburban hell." Neighbors came home through the garage and entered their kitchens through the garage. I had to ask myself, what is the point of a foyer? It must be part of the middle class affluence, just like the extra living room no one ever goes in, except, perhaps, the maid. Besides the kids who played out in the yards (usually the backyard), the only neighbors I ever saw were the ones who only went outside to wash their cars and boat, and even then they usually made their kids do it. I occasionally saw someone taking a run or walk, but that was about the extent of it.

Prior to living in Lexington I lived in Alpharetta, GA, which had many gated "communities," if you could call them communities. There was a big wall that surrounded these places and guards on duty 24 hours a day at every gate. The houses inside were big, and that was about a "luxurious" as they got. I had a couple of friends who lived in these places, and whenever I went to visit I never saw a soul that wasn't in their car, on their way to their car, or leaving it to go inside.

All this invokes what Eliade had to say about ancient cities: within the walls of the city was the order of creation, to which the city itself was the center of all of creation, and beyond those walls were danger. Beyond the lands those citizens knew were strange people, queer lands, exotic and lethal creatures, and completely hostile landscapes. Essentially, beyond the cities was the primordial chaos, in which the laws and orders of creation had not been established, and the primordial elements still battled for dominance. It was a scary place for people of antiquity. The classic example of the chaos beyond what is known is on old maps, where off on the edges of oceans was written: HERE BE MONSTERS. (Usually there are just monsters drawn on the map).

This is the exact psycho-sociological problem facing the American middle class. The middle class has longed for isolation for so long, to "get away," and conquer the frontier; Manifest Destiny. So, really the middle class has never had that foreign land where there be monsters. The frontiersmen conquered all that for them, and set up some nice and comfortable homes for them on those vanquished frontiers. The only frontier for the middle class is an inner frontier, not an outer one, and they certainly are not going to start soul searching when there is so much to buy and watch on TV! They are all, in a sense, socially awkward penguins. Their children never go outside anymore, glued to the TV and video games, and ever increasing rates of obesity, we are doomed to this isolation and fear of the front lawn.

And if everything beyond the walls of our houses are that queer land filled with dangerous people (i.e. pedophiles, kidnappers, and ax murderers), then certainly our neighbors are just as scary to us as those scary people in the poor side of town. If our neighbors are the enemy, no wonder no one lives up to the infamous saying of Christ: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. If our neighbors, who we haven't gotten to know, can be pedophiles, why should we love them? There be a lot of monsters.