We're Too Old and Too Wise to Play "Katy Bar the Door"

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Meriç Dağlı on Unsplash

No, we can’t put a lock and chain on our state, our town, our county, our country

Dear Reader: a kind reminder that I am going to paid subscriptions the beginning of the year. I will still publish some material free for everyone but for some odd reason, free doesn’t pay the bills. I am fully aware of the competition for eyeballs and attention. If my work serves you I hope you’ll consider supporting it. Thank you in advance.

Not for the first time I received a note on a story I wrote about American immigrants: people who sell and move to a perceived better location.

A reader wrote:

No, don't come to Florida. We are losing our paradise because of overcrowding. Come visit, go home.

Therein lies the problem. EVERYONE says that. Visit, but go home.

Anyone who reads Outside Magazine knows what happened to those “great little sports towns” like Boulder, CO and Bend OR that “nobody knows about.” They are bursting at the seams, overpriced and over-crowded. Laramie is their latest; wait a while.

Of course, like those gorgeous towns in Montana that people saw only in movies like A River Runs Through It, wait until winter to discover just how wonderful those towns are, amiright?

You ask any Santa Fe Indigenous local who got priced out of that fabulous artsy little town by the massive influx of New Yorkers back in the Seventies.

Every pretty community, every state, every nice town, every single space in America says precisely the same thing. Has for years and years and years. Several aspects to this.

Let's start with when I moved to Colorado back in 1971. The universal chant was "Don't Californicate Colorado."

Californians are universally vilified. People forget that there was a wholesale influx of people to that fine state which effectively "ruined" it decades and decades ago. Those natural-born California folks were none too happy about that either.

Of course, ask Mexico, who were the inhabitants of much of Western USA, about the Treaty of Hidalgo:

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)

This treaty, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the war between the United States and Mexico. By its terms, Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including the present-day states California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. Mexico also relinquished all claims to Texas, and recognized the Rio Grande as the southern boundary with the United States.

How do you think they felt having to cede all that land to us, and now millions of Americans are “invading” Mexico to escape, wait for it…being invaded by internal immigrants. Including Mexicans, who had been there first, along with all the tribes who had been there much further back.

The irony. Please.

Plenty of those tribes moved, too, and warred, and invaded, taking lands and food and water from other tribes, who fervently wished that they would visit, trade and go home.

“Go back where you came from,” the racist, idiot trope of the immigrant to other immigrants.

What folks worried about back in 1971 is precisely what happened to Colorado. It is one great, bustling megalopolis from nearly Cheyenne all the way down to Colorado Springs, much like I-5.

Plenty thousands more move to Denver because to them, it’s paradise.

Unimaginable from when I first lived there. I hate going back because of it. It’s ugly. Ugly. Ugly. To me, at least, because I remember Denver of 1971. The Hill in Boulder was one of the hippy stopping places of kids traveling from the East to Berkeley, California in droves.

Many of those kids were on the move to California, the Sixties Dust Bowl movement, for promises of Free Love. Of course lots of those folks are now members of the Radical Right and the John Birch Society, just saying. And developers, just saying.

I can’t go back to Central Florida without being repelled by what developers have done to my once-lovely home town. Groves are gone, forests are gone, along with all the creatures and night sounds which made it a paradise for me as a child.

Gone. Paved over. NOT PARADISE. See? It’s all relative.

Overwhelmed Californians started moving to places like Seattle. Seattle says precisely the same thing. Boise once had a mayoral candidate who ran solely on the platform of keeping Californians out.

Asheville North Carolina, the same thing. In fact, I was inspired to write this article on Medium.com back in 2018 because an Asheville resident was vehemently saying visit then GET OUT.

Austin TX says the same thing.

STOP! GO AWAY! DON’T COME TO OUR PARADISE!

Visit, spend money but get the F—- out afterwards. MY town, county, city, state, country.

That’s a lot to own, don’t you think?

Every pretty little town in America has been "invaded," say the inhabitants.

What’s ridiculous is that those who just moved there feel even more protective. Right after they move there, it becomes THEIR town/county/state, they want to lock it away for themselves.

Let’s build a wall.

Every pretty town I ever moved to and lived in felt precisely the same way. The locals feel invaded, then the invaders feel invaded.

Understandable, but, frankly ridiculous in the largest sense.

Back in 2011 when I first went to Thailand I heard a British ex-pat complain bitterly that too many people were invading "his" Thailand.

Dude, the country doesn’t belong to you.

Lots of folks who moved to Barcelona or Lisbon are pissed that place got “discovered.” They want all the new ex-pats and tourists to go somewhere else.

Dude, the locals want YOU gone.

Portugal, Ecuador, Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand...name your destination. Small communities in India are being overwhelmed by rich Indian city folk in precisely the same way.

Let's go large.

Long before the American Indian, there were moving populations of folks who came to this continent to become their ancestors. Weather, food, whatever…they moved.

America was invaded and colonized by White folks who committed genocide. South America was invaded and colonized by Europeans who committed genocide. Rich, sophisticated African countries were invaded and colonized by Europeans and others who committed genocide.

EVERY single one of those peoples who were invaded wanted those people to GO HOME.

People kept coming. And they will keep coming. Dangerous populist governments are coming to power on the promise to kick out all those awful Others. Including us.

Guestimates are that there are about nine million Americans living overseas. They live in “paradise” at the whim of governments elected by people who are increasingly tired of the changes ex-pats bring.

In Colombia, where I once considered moving, the healthcare system has already been changed to keep out the very sick Westerners who want free care for expensive illnesses that often come as a result of a lifetime of overindulgence.

Why should those countries pay for our gluttony? Just saying.

There are millions of Syrians, Lebanese, Africans etc. of all stripes on the move because of wars and global warming. They don’t want paradise. They bloody well didn’t want to move in the first place; they would have preferred to stay where they were born, raise food and a family. Just like us.

Millions in America will also have to move, including eventually OUT of the Southeast, especially Florida because, well, shit, hurricanes. Don’t people listen to the news? They move there anyway. Go figure.

Again, let’s go back to my personal experience, fifty years in Colorado.

In my old city of Denver, older neighborhoods like Five Points once inhabited by Black folks are being bought out and gentrified. Happening all over. Where the hell are those folks supposed to move with the cost of housing?

Where are the workers supposed to live when all the trailer parks in Denver were sold because they were close to light rail, therefore hugely valuable, and now those folks are without a home? People want nice, pricey condos right next to light rail.

The workers in those parks got upended, invaded, booted out.

It’s what we do, and call it progress. The Trail of Tears happened because….progress.

It is the nature of human beings to move where they believe it's better. It is also the nature of human beings to, after they have moved to said "better place," to want to gate off their newfound community against Others, which they were themselves once (a point I make in the original piece), to protect said community against those terrible people who are going to ruin it.

It’s also the nature of people to not give a good damn about the communities they invade, either.

So to that point, they themselves were part of the so-called ruination of that very community by moving there, talking about it, and inspiring others to move there.

Photo by Michael Kirsh on Unsplash

In the years I lived in Colorado, five million folks moved there, mostly to the Front Range area. John Denver wrote and sang about how awful it was in the Seventies; he was part of the reason people moved there because of Rocky Mountain High.

John Denver was a prime author of the ruination of the state he loved.

I was one of those people who moved there. Not because of John Denver, but because I went there on a whim and fell in love with the place. Denver is now the most expensive non-coastal real estate market in the country.

I could feel territorial about Eugene. I love it here. I don't want it to grow any more. I don't want it to change after I moved here because I like it the way it is. But to locals, people like me who moved here are changing THEIR place, so I am part of the problem. I’m an immigrant.

Because I see all this, every time I get irritated at the expansion of a huge apartment complex not far from my house, I remind myself of all these points.

Get over yourself.. You’re an immigrant.

I'm a born and raised Floridian. I lived the annual winter invasion. Worked in the tourist industry and watched people move there after falling in love with the State. Saw what happened to wildlife habitat that was plowed over and paved for apartments and condos for old folks.

I get it. It’s the fastest-growing state, largely thanks to the growing number of retirees. I’m at a loss for why, given the hurricanes, but I guess people really believe that it won’t happen to them. Until it does.

We don't get to dictate to others to stay away from "our" state.

The state isn't ours. The city, town, county aren’t ours. The entire Earth isn't ours. Even our bodies aren’t ours. We're renters. We are temporary here. Each one of us is doing our level best to live our best life. For many it means to move, when their homes are in flames, under a flood or blown away, or invading hordes are killing every living thing in sight.

I’m not saying we’re wrong for trying to preserve whatever paradise we have found. I am however asking all of us to recognize that we are all immigrants. All of us.

It behooves us to find ways to fit in, learn the local language and customs. That goes for moving in the US as well. The way you live and drive in New York is NOT welcomed in other parts of the country. We are a crazy quilt of extremes, from the Navajo to the NE lobster fisherman.

You get it. Let’s stop trying to make where we’ve moved into where we came from. It’s what we wanted to leave, right?

So is my reader wrong? No. Not my point. I’m pointing out the universal fallacy of the argument. We are all temporary. We are all immigrants in some way. We are, many of us, inspired or driven to move to another place, sometimes not of our choice.

When we take in the larger world view, perhaps it allows us to create some grace around why we see what we see. Let’s stop complaining about all those people who are “ruining” our state/city/town/country. I wore a uniform to protect our right to move anywhere we want.

Until we become a police state and we have to have papers to drive across state or city borders, let’s celebrate the fact that we CAN move somewhere new, start over, and begin again.

Billions of people will be doing just that from climate change alone.

We are temporary inhabitants of a tiny blue marble spinning along at great speed and in great peril from our collective stupidity and greed, our lack of understanding and compassion, our hate and racism and ignorance. We can do better.

This whole world was once paradise.

We have shat all over it, even trashed close-in space around our planet. It’s breathtaking what we’ve done to this tiny world of ours. Collectively we get to clean it up. Here’s just one example: massive piles of garbage clothing in the remarkable Atacama Desert of Chile.

That’s us, not a “them.”

Let’s stop “othering” people who either choose or have to move for a better life or to even exist at all. If you moved, you are an “other,” just like I am, where you live now. We are in this together.

So let’s see how we can help clean up the messes that caused so many to move in the first place.

Nobody is an “other.” They are us. WE get to do the work.

There is only we, and there is only through. Let’s do this.

Let’s find a way to play.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

These are tough times and tough times demand courage and patience. I appreciate your reading my work and hope that it adds perspective for our journey ahead.

Thank you.