Out of lifes cocoon
October 25, 1998
When we moved back to the Paterson area last February, we thought life would be better, a coming home for me, and a journey of hope for Sharon. We had made the erroneous presumption that we could slip back into that mode of life that had existed before Hoboken, that sense of personal space that I had lived with most of my life, from growing up in Clifton to when I lived in Passaic for the last time.
We had mistakenly presumed that Hoboken and its hectic selfish world was something different or new, due to its location and its population, as if we had fallen into a pack of wolves, and needed only to relocate to escape it.
Yesterday, I came to realize the fallacy of this assumption, how it wasn't the location that was wrong, but the world, and that it had been growing more and more greedy full of more and more self-centered people for many years, and that my arrival in Hoboken, was not falling into something, but falling out of the protective cocoon in which I had lived most of my life.
I had simply missed the clues before but recognized them with perfect hindsight when I saw my mistake. I knew, for instance, that the world had changed significantly with the oil embargo of the 1970s and that an important coming of age had occurred in my generation, changing them from hopeful children to something more intent upon getting their own, but deep down, I still lived with the belief that the world remained fundamentally the same as when I grew up, and that for the most part the most greedy of people were the exception not the rule. I failed to see how well I adapted to the change, by changing my circumstances in order to avoid dealing with the real world. During a drive down route 46 one day in the mid-1970s, I found myself in a traffic jam where none had existed before, among angry, hurried people willing to cut me off for a few inches and a few minutes less in their drive time commute.
I began to take alternate routes, wearing through the North Caldwell mountains so as to avoid such people. It seemed naturalŪ½to me. This avoidance allowed me to continue one aspect of my illusion, and afterwards, I found work that did not require me to drive in rush hour, thereby furthering the illusion. In fact, I kept free of the cycles of traffic for more than 15 years, going when everyone was coming, coming when they decided to go.
Only when we moved to Hoboken, did I fall back into the traffic and life patterns of the real world, and found myself shocked by what I found. Gone was the easy riding I remembered, and the sense of personal space, even walking down the sidewalk. In fact, outside of Hoboken and Hudson County, it was nearly impossible to actually "walk" anywhere since SUVs and other macho vehicles drove on sidewalks as well as the street, threatening to run down anyone who used feet as a mode of transportation. Sharon got struck on Straight Street in Paterson on the mistaken belief people stopped for traffic lights, or even saw her.
But on the road and off, Americans did not see anyone but their most immediate relations, and then only as reflections of themselves, a constant reminder that they, not the community, are the center of the universe.
It is a startling revelation to discover myself so alternative for so many years that I missed the change, that people will run you over on the street or the supermarket as if you didn't exist, because to them you don't exist, and never will exist unless you give them something they need or want.
I fear for the world ahead, when a new chaos will emerge, and we will fall back into that pre-Homer world where tribes ruled and every man and woman fought -- not for ideals or principals, not for a better society -- but for themselves.
Thus, I seek to return to my pleasant blindness outside Hoboken, and found it in utter ruins. You can't close your eyes again once they are open, and though you can seek to return to an alternative life style, like the one I had for years, now the innocence is gone, now I know that outside my shell, the real world grows more greedy, more self-centered, and more disgusting.
Better, I see it happening than get blind-sided again