Sunday, September 6, 2009

From Tulsa's Holiday Hills To San Francisco's Mission



Wednesday is the first day of school. I always love the sights and sounds of children, teachers and parents greeting each other with anticipation for the new year. I am keenly aware of how lucky I am to work in a vibrant and diverse San Francisco neighborhood. I am privileged to own a home nearby where I hope to live again. Neighborhoods shape our view of the world and our place in it.

Throughout my life I have lived surrounded by affluence. The typical 50's- 60's subdivision, Holiday Hills, of my childhood, Tulsa's upscale enclave of Maple Ridge where I spent my Junior League years, the gold paved streets of Palo Alto, the beautifully manicured neighborhood where I raised my children when they were in elementary school and the exclusive estates which surround my current home in Woodside have all been filled with people like me. My neighbors in these places have been mostly white, well educated Americans who have never known hunger,faced discrimination based on color or creed and don't worry about obtaining adequate housing, education or health care. Life presents everyone with challenges but throughout my life I have enjoyed opportunity and support. It is very easy to be a conservative when one is privileged. I assumed that everyone had similar opportunities and that social programs coddled people. I was very uncomfortable with anything that veered from the norm, whether it was landscaping with native plants instead of pansies or men and woman who found love with same sex partners. When everyone you know well is like you it is easy to label people who are different as wrong or weak.

I am still an affluent, white woman with a country club membership and business class seats on airplanes but my life is much richer because of my contact with the wider world. As I walk to work on streets where grime is mixed with beauty and where I am surrounded by people whose path is very different from my own I feel more connected to the world than I ever felt in my 'hood. Everyday I realize how much I don't know about the world and how much I want to learn. It's all good.