Everyone In America Is An Outsider
Living in America, I sometimes feel a sense of alienation.
Well, that can’t be helped.
I’m an outsider here, after all.
According to the people who’ve been here longer than me, California is apparently one of the more fortunate places to be. It’s an immigrant region to begin with, so there are no old ties, and turnover is high. The races are mixed too, and if anything, white people make up a smaller share than you’d expect.
That’s fine.
Lucky, lucky.
But,
well, what exists, exists.
Occasionally, at least.
Now,
one thing about this place stands out as particularly brutal.
Penalties here are extremely harsh.
$70 for illegal parking, $300 for speeding, $1000 if your car gets towed. That’s the going rate.
And as it happens,
I got hit with a fine the other day.
There’s a train called CalTrain that runs the length of the Bay Area in California.
That train, inconveniently, has no ticket gates.
Free riding, wide open? No, surely everyone just buys a ticket properly? This is not a country that runs on such a naive assumption of good faith.
So instead, an attendant occasionally walks through the train checking tickets.
The other day, I got on having forgotten to renew my pass.
Fine: $400.
The one-way train fare is $7.
Sigh.
This breaks your spirit.
It makes you want to say “I want to go back home now.”
You go pay the fine at the Court, and at the counter I tried complaining to the lady there:
“This is rough, man, I just got to America—”
She replied with a smile: “Welcome to Unite Status.”
Quite the witty lady.
Still, in some corner of my heart, at the sheer size of the fine,
I found myself irrationally shouting, “Hey, are you trying to kick me out?”
But standing in line at the counter, I noticed something obvious.
This is universal.
Everyone gets fined the same way.
The tall white guy ahead of me was negotiating something at the counter (pointless, I think),
and before him, a Hispanic woman paid her fine irritably and briskly, then left.
The girl behind me, who looked Chinese, was holding the same piece of paper issued by the court that I was.
Same.
Universal.
Sigh.
And yet I feel alienated.
Why is that?
It’s because,
flowing underneath it all,
I end up receiving the message:
“If you’re not useful, get out.”
“We don’t need people who cause trouble.”
“Contribute to the treasury, or leave.”
That message.
This tone has seeped into the culture, unconsciously, as a given.
In the end, Americans are all outsiders.
The United States has, at most, a 200-year history.
Even families who were here from the start are probably only five or six generations deep.
And such people are a minority,
so most people are really only two or three generations in.
In other words, everyone is, at best, “the son of an outsider,” “the grandson of an outsider.”
In the end, “United” is just a “community.”
And harsh punishment seems like a convenient way to manage a group made up entirely of outsiders.
Which approach is better is a matter of opinion, and opinions will differ.
Anyway,
this is the American way (dooonn!).
Now,
by contrast,
Japan
Japan’s relaxed atmosphere and kindness toward its own citizens could be called a serious case of island-nation insularity,
yet public order doesn’t collapse, people don’t fall into poverty, and somehow it all works out.
Seen from the perspective of “systems,” it might actually be quite something.
For instance,
it occurs to me, suddenly,
to go back to the difference in underlying principles between organizational units like the nation 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, growth that can’t come together alone.
It’s a community built to construct these things.
So people who aren’t useful either get paid less or get let go.
Call that natural law, an extension of the basic principle.
Then,
why, and for what purpose, does the nation exist?
When you ask that question, the answer surely isn’t the same set of conditions as with a company.
What we want from a company: active vitality? Or stability?
What we want from a nation: stability? Or competitiveness abroad? Support?
I don’t know whether an era where we get to choose our nation will ever come,
but at the very least, what is it we want from a nation, and what benefits do we expect from that,
and what do we give up as the tradeoff?
Starting from one stupid traffic ticket,
I found myself,
suddenly,
thinking about all this.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2012/12/71/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.