If you get the Sunday N.Y. Times, you might have read a piece in the Review section entitled “The Nihilism of The Golden Years.” It’s about a gigantic retirement community in Florida called The Villages that’s been likened to Disneyland for old people. Old white people. Conservative old white people.
The Times reporter who wrote it went down there for a while to research her story. She was at a musical show—there’s all sorts of entertainment all day and night—where a cover band was doing tunes from Pink Floyd, Rod Stewart, the Police. All of a sudden, “a trim woman sporting short dark hair and a visor” wandered over, “quizzing me about who I was and what I’m working on.” Then the trim woman said, “Brenda. Strong conservative and strong Christian.”
The Villages, you see, is MAGA country. Its 130,000 residents (I told you it was gigantic) are overwhelmingly Republican Trump supporters. They cherish their sameness with each other, their whiteness, their conservatism, and the way they watch out for each other. As the reporter put it, “This sense of belonging may flow as much from who is not a part of The Villages as who is.” There are almost no people of color. The few Democrats who dare to put campaign signs in their yards have had them vandalized. The community, the reporter writes, is “a distillation of the cross currents at play in an America that is simultaneously greying and diversifying.” The Villages “works overtime to maintain a replica” of the “fantasy” that Trump exploited among such people: “a shiny, happy small-town bubble where seniors can tune out the rest of the world and party like it’s 1969.”
Obviously, there’s very little crime in The Villages, and no homelessness at all. Nobody has to cross the street to avoid ranters and crazies exposing their privates (although they do have to beware golf carts driven by drunk seniors). Hence the “Disneyland for old people” metaphor: “So long as taxes stay low and the golf courses stay open, Villagers can stay focused on living the dream.”
As I read the story, I couldn’t help but make comparisons with Oakland. I would love to live someplace where there was no crime, no homeless people and no dirty encampments.
But would I move to a place like The Villages? No. Not a chance. For a whole bunch of reasons. If a complete stranger walked up to me and said, “Brenda. Strong conservative and strong Christian,” I’d have to resist the urge to tell her to fuck off. I don’t mind some aspects of conservatism, but I loathe that species in general, especially their worship of a dangerous, orange-haired lunatic. There’s another reason why I would never move to The Villages: as hard as life in Oakland can be, I glory in the fact of our city’s diversity. Yes, it can be tough when different cultures, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, ages and political beliefs rub up against each other. It’s this very discomfort, which I readily admit to, that is the reason so many old white people relocate to The Villages and places like it. They’re tired of struggling, of trying to make all the pieces fit together, of every day having to do the hard work of making America work.
I get tired, too. But I am proud that I, and all of us, remain in Oakland to do that work. I would rather stay in this crazy city and try to make the melting pot analogy of our democracy a reality. I consider myself, and all of us, soldiers in that struggle. I would not want to flee to some safe, analgesic fantasyland and spend the rest of my life playing shuffleboard and never seeing anyone who didn’t look like me. I feel sorry for the residents of The Villages. I’m sure they feel sorry for me, living as I do in a Blue city with plenty of problems that The Villages doesn’t have. But I console myself Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech, “The Man in the Arena… whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
We in Oakland are trying to do perhaps the greatest deed of all: learning to live in a rainbow city in peace and harmony. I wouldn’t trade that for all the shuffleboard in the world.
Steve Heimoff