I’ve just been on holiday in California – San Diego, to be precise. First time. At the airport, outbound, I was singled out. Uniquely I was not required to take off my shoes at security. This was offensive. Do I not look dangerous enough? What sort of profiling was this? I felt like those countries outraged at being left off the list of the Axis of Evil....or perhaps they feared my feet smell.
The San Diego landscape is astonishing in its space, its mountains, its curved horizon of ocean (with the faint lid of pollution – the Pacific is too calm to blow the muck away). Snow on distant peaks and as long as I was there, a Santa Ana event gave us unbroken blue sky and summer heat. So long walks along various beaches where few people were, the odd pelican, the odd seal, some elegant surfers.
But what I have been left with is a sense of a man-made environment that has probably unwittingly created the most fractured society I think I have ever seen. Most people (I think) seem to live in suburban enclaves, in bungalows crouching behind huge garages. They emerge from the house into the garage and their chosen car for the day. They drive out. There is no one on the pavements. School holidays but no children to be seen - anywhere. No public playgrounds. Until they are old enough to drive themselves, children have to be driven. They cannot meet without adult agency. They cannot hang out together unless someone takes them. No buses. No trains. Nowhere to cycle because each suburban bit is separated from the next by freeway. Even the adults seem only to encounter one another only in shopping malls or possibly on the beach...or by arrangement. Did I miss something?