Sprite asked me on our two hour walk Saturday what was the biggest difference between a small town and a big city. She had observed as we were walking through a less upscale (not downscale by any means) block in our neighborhood the downside of growing up in such a place as Redondo Beach. Everyplace else, she said, seems not as nice. Not bad, just not nice. And, she observed, we're at sea level and I get short of breath at the higher elevations.
It is harder to breathe in other cities, but I think that the biggest difference is in the way you treat people. In big cities, people are expendable, both in the good ways and in the bad ways. But what cuts the other way is that small town hospitality is not necessarily moral.
We take it as a cliche that people from small towns are all up in your business. You can't move without your every action being scoped out and commented upon. Equally it is well understood that small towns tend to be friendlier places to live. The people seem to care more and treat you with more common courtesy. I say both observations are true but make a virtue out of necessity. I mean, where else are you going to go?
When you're in a small town, your obligations to your neighbor exist because there is often no utility or corporate entity to do the same thing. If the bank isn't open on Sunday and there's no ATM, you're going to have to loan the guy in the pew next to you a couple dollars for the collection plate. He'll repay you on Monday. When you make a commitment to somebody, especially somebody who has got one wheel in the sand, it matters more. You become more of a hero and you become more obligated. Leadership is easy to accomplish in smaller populations. That is because people do without.
In a big city, where people and talent are abundant, it's easy to ignore your neighbor. That's because there's always somebody else who can fit the bill. There are plenty of fish in the sea. There's a hundred people just like you at your favorite restaurant and it's OK to be one dimensional like that.
I think most importantly, it's OK to strive for something obscure and rare in the big city. There are other rocketeers under the big October Sky. The barrel isn't frictionless, but fewer crabs hang on trying to bring you down. Go ahead, do whatchulike. Whatever.
"Whatever" doesn't work in close proximity. You have to fish or cut bait, because there's only one boat.
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In the fine film 'The Book of Eli', the protagonist tells about the world before the great nuclear Flash now thirty winters ago. People didn't know what was important. They threw away things that we now kill for. That's the move from big town with big resources to small town with small resources.
I think about this in terms of the ambit of moral authority, of the attitudes, values and ethics of people who think globally including myself vs the people who think locally. I think about the conversation I had with my sister about the people in the Midwest she went to teach so many years ago. How they were all married at 21 and 22 and 23. How their own football team meant everything. How the houses were cheap so anybody could afford one and so having a new truck was a much bigger deal.
It's all about leverage. How many people do you need to do what you do? When you're a sophisticate, when you're highly leveraged, when you need a metropolitan base to do your duty, you must think globally. You must be intolerant of the ordinary - you have too much authority to be incorrect or amateurish. Your mistakes and failures are costly to others. You need the right people in the right place at the right time and you need to adopt an outsized personality to lead people who don't really need to be impressed because they are impressive in their own right. You can make tactical errors and ignore people's feelings so long as you are strategically right.
When you are in the small context and it comes down to you, you need to be able to make a direct impact, face to face with each person you meet. Large or small, good or bad. You don't have time for prejudices and discrimination. You need to be nobody. Your mission is equally important with every man you meet and it must work through those with no specializations. It doesn't matter what your strategy is, your life depends on making each person feel special. You must come clean. You've got nowhere else to go.
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People stuck in the wrong context for their personalities find worlds of troubles they don't ask for. The man from Iowa who never needed to pronounce Vietnamese names verbally butchers a Nguyen. What a rube! He must be stupid. The man from New York who never bothered to take coffee in the lunch room snubs the wrong secretary. What an asshole. Who does he think he is? Each inherits challenges to their credibility that they don't necessarily deserve, simply by expressing the people skills of their hometowns.
It's not a moral question. It is a question of survival. But these dissonances are almost always perceived as a matter of character.
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Is the man who grew up where people are plenty wrong for berating an inferior? I watch Indians sort out their class differences at big corporations. It's an extraordinary social dynamic. Here, where Indians seem rare, we Yanks often are amazed that they can be so abrasive with each other. Don't they feel like a minority - shouldn't they stick together? No. It's something different I think. Is the welcome of black Americans in small towns in the Northeast genuine? Perhaps a rare person is needed even more in the human roach motels of the Rust Belt, and in the South where they are plentiful - well who cares? Is it moral?
I think it's a numbers game.
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