- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I spent my first 35 years living in California. The cold but beautiful part. I've lived in San Antonio (the patron saint of lost articles) for over ten years now, so I am more than well-qualified to cast analysis, or aspersions, in just about any direction.
In the first place, wages are low in San Antonio, but so is the cost of living. It is still possible to own a home and twenty minute commute to work! Praise your favorite anthropomorphization of the truth! But the quality of life, while higher than Mexico, is not as healthy and healthful as my home state. After ten years here and never so much as having hayfever or a sneeze, increasingly I have noticed both during the Spring.
As an IT worker, I was out of work for a good three years due in no small part to the importation of cheap labor from Bangalore and all places south of the border. What economic boom were we referencing, exactly? I am employed, once again, thank goodness, but in a position of significantly less "security", salary and standing. However, I am grateful I have anything at this point. I have not only my recent personal experiences but also the experiences of friends who grew up in Mexico to buttress my conclusion that much of what is in Mexico is creeping northward and precious little is heading south.
So rather than globalization representing a gigantic free-for-all of abundance where the standard of living rises for the middle class everywhere, we can expect that, just as in Mexico, the middle class will disappear leaving only the jaded and inbred rich to further disrupt and destroy the spec of cosmic dust we presently call, "home."
San Antonio, if one looks more closer than did your reporter, does represent the future of the American worker: selling french fries and hustling cable TV over the phone because not everyone with a college education gets to be an astronaut or an oil magnate. Discrimination is still very much here with all the po' folks living on the south and west sides of town, and the rich white minority occupying the exclusive homes ever-farther north of town while the disenfranchised blacks occupy the dwindling infrastructure of the east side.
The tale is not one of race or ethnicity, but of rich and poor. Always has been, always will be. If were living as my ex-wife in an over-priced 600,000 dollar home in central California, I would sell the damn thing and buy ten of the same kind of home here in Texas. The animosity Texans hold towards most things Californian resembles something more than an economic or political war, but a Civil War. Based in Houston, the objective has long been to shake every nickel out of California and put it in Texas. Not everyone has to be a victim of warfare.
As the dollar slides those who mortgaged themselves in paradise will wake up with nothing in the middle of a blazing hell. And, as I've discoverd, people in hell don't drink ice water...they drink iced tea. Sweet or unsweet.
