All right, the actual news today is too depressing to contemplate & I don't feel like doing Real Work, so I'm gonna yell more about lawns on here. You've been warned -- mute if necessary. So, let's talk about the absolute tragedy of 20th century US land use.
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For most of ... well, history, people lived in settlements, in close proximity, sharing public spaces & facilities. In post-war America, we decided to go a different way. We decided to chip away, erode, & eventually all but banish public space. But the thing is ...
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... public spaces & facilities provide lots of useful services! If you're going to get rid of them, then each individual homeowner basically has to recreate them. Replace public parks with lawns & play structures. Replace public festivals/gatherings with backyard BBQs.
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And so on. The idea was: you don't need a public. As an American capitalist consumer, you can recreate everything you need about it on your own private estate. (That's where "lawns" originated -- giant rich-people estates.) Your nuclear family is self-contained, self-sustaining.
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Two important things to add about this: one, it was not organic, a simple response to the unique character & demands of Americans. It was driven by business interests -- road builders, home builders, chain-stores eager to sell individual BBQs to every single suburbanite.
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Second & most importantly: it was driven by racism. The point of escaping the public & moving everything behind private property lines was, though it created a wan, empty substitute for the public, *at least you could exclude black people*.
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This is what
@hmcghee's whole (excellent) book is about. Her central parable is about communities draining their public pools rather than integrate them. White Americans basically chose to destroy the public realm rather than share it.Show this thread -
The results obviously hurt the excluded minorities, but *they also hurt the white people*. When you move the public into private spaces, you get inequality. Not everyone can afford their own pool. Most people just lost access to swimming.
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Most people ended up in suburbs with shitty private simulacra of public spaces & services -- and it's been going on so long they don't even remember what they've lost. They don't know there's another way. They don't know that there can even BE a robust public.
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Which brings us back to the lawn. You lost public spaces, where people can gather & encounter one another & learn to live together & form actual communities. In exchange, you got this: that weedy, labor-intensive brown patch in front of your house, which is empty 99% of the time.
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Thanks to capitalism & racism, we traded the public for the private, thus ensuring massive inequality, atomization, loneliness, isolation, declining trust in public institutions, & a whole generation of suburban men who need militia cosplay to feel like a part of something.
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And to make it work, we covered everything in pavement & made daily life utterly dependent on 2-ton machines which poison & kill tens of thousands of us every year -- machines to which we've developed hostage-style attachment.
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In conclusion, fuck lawns, thank you for coming to my ted talk. </fin>
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If you enjoyed this twitter rant, click on over and read the full blog rant version!https://www.volts.wtf/p/a-rant-about-lawns-in-america …
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End of conversation
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