Everyone in America is treated as an outsider
Living in America unfortunately gives me a sense of alienation now and then.
Well, that can’t be helped.
I’m an outsider here.
According to the experienced folks who’ve been here a while, California is actually quite blessed in this respect. It’s an immigrant place to begin with, so there are no old-boy networks, and turnover is high. People come from all kinds of races, and whites are actually a minority.
That’s good.
Lucky, lucky.
But,
well, what exists, exists.
Only occasionally, though.
Now,
among all this, the one thing that stands out as particularly brutal is
how severe the penalties are
$70 for parking in a no-parking zone, $300 for speeding, $1,000 if your car gets towed. That’s the going rate.
Speaking of which,
I got hit with a fine myself the other day.
There’s a train called CalTrain that runs the length of the Bay Area in California,
and the trouble with that train is it has no ticket gates.
Free riding at will? Or does everyone just buy a ticket properly like they’re supposed to? This is not a country that runs on such a naive assumption that people are fundamentally good.
So instead, a conductor occasionally comes through the train to check tickets.
And the other day, I forgot to renew my pass and rode anyway.
$400 fine.
A one-way train fare is $7.
Sigh,
this is soul-crushing.
I felt like saying “I want to go home to my country already.”
I went to pay the fine at the Court, and at the counter I complained to the lady there,
“This is rough, man, I just got to America~”
and she smiled and replied, “Welcome to Unite Status.”
Quite the witty lady.
Still, in some corner of my heart, at the severity of this fine
I found myself shouting the illogical thought,
“Hey, hey, are you trying to kick me out?”
But standing in line at the window, I noticed something obvious.
This is shared by everyone.
Everyone gets fined the same way
The tall white guy in front of me was negotiating something at the window (pointlessly, I think),
and before him, a Hispanic lady paid her fine curtly and irritably, then left.
The girl behind me, who looked Chinese, was holding the same court-issued paper I was.
Same.
Shared by all.
Sigh…
But I still feel alienated. Why is that?
Because,
flowing beneath it all, is this message:
“If you’re not useful, get out.”
“We don’t need people who cause trouble.”
“Contribute to the national treasury, or leave.”
This is the
message
I end up receiving.
This tone has soaked into the culture unconsciously.
In the end, Americans are all outsiders.
The United States has a history of at most 200 years.
Even the families who were here from the start are probably only five or six generations in, and such people are a minority anyway,
so in the end, most people are really only two or three generations deep.
In other words, everyone is at best “the son of an outsider,” “the grandson of an outsider.”
In the end, “United” is nothing more than “a community held together.”
Strict punishment seems like a convenient way to keep such a collection of outsiders firmly in line.
Which is better is up to each person to decide, and opinions will differ,
but in any case,
this is the American way (bam!).
Now,
by contrast,
Japan
Japan’s laid-back atmosphere and kindness toward its own people could also be called serious island-nation insularity,
but somehow, without public order collapsing or people falling into poverty, it gets by.
Looked at from the perspective of “the system,” it might actually be quite something.
For instance,
it occurs to me,
let me go back to the difference in the basic philosophy underlying organizational units like the state and the company.
Why does a company exist?
So that useful people can form a team and generate organic synergy. Things you can’t do alone, funds you can’t obtain alone, ideas, support, and growth that don’t come together alone.
It’s a community built to construct those things.
So people who aren’t useful either get paid less or are let go.
Call that natural law, an extension of the basic philosophy.
Then,
why, and for what purpose, does a nation exist?
When asked that, the conditions surely aren’t the same as for a company.
What do we want from a company — active vitality, or stability?
What do we want from a nation — stability? Or competitiveness abroad? Support?
I don’t know whether an era of choosing your nation will come,
but at the very least, what do we want from a nation, what benefits do we expect to get from it,
and what do we give up as the trade-off?
Starting from one pointless traffic ticket,
it occurred to me,
and I gave it some thought.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2012/12/71/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.