Minnie & Me Across The Deep Blue Sea: Civic Pride
Like all middle-class, white English people (even those who profess to deny it), I’m imbued with the innate conviction that the English are somehow ‘better’. It’s the only thing that keeps us going as we become more of a global laughing stock with every passing year. (Really, I know we’re not better. I realise we’re just as reprehensible as everyone else - but we imbibe superiority with every cuppa, every bit of overdone national pomp, every school history lesson…especially as History is all we’ve got left to show off about.) So, as a ‘naturally better Brit’, it shreds the very fibre of my being to be in America, of all places - that absolute pit of iniquity (I’m joking, of course) - and to discover something that’s been utterly absent from the England I inhabit for the best part of forty years. I’m talking, of course, of civic pride, which gushes through this area like a Versailles fountain: community projects, endless gatherings, frequent fundraisers. Now, all of that might simply be because I’ve washed up in an affluent, liberal, ‘true blue’ state, where plenty of First-World guilt prompts a groundswell of giving. However, it isn’t just the fetes for Pride, the charities for habitat preservation, the historical societies and arts fairs. It’s the fact that despairing decay is just not a thing here like it is on a British high street. The little towns are immaculate; quirky and twee in equal measure. Even the tiniest place sports freshly-spruced paintwork and municipally-planted flowers. The display outside my local supermarket alone would not disgrace an RHS garden. Can’t see that happening at Tesco’s somehow. Everything gleams with good intentions and the basic understanding that diligent husbandry of one’s own plot renders the whole much nicer for everyone (and keeps the prices up accordingly). We’re all well-aware how that one unkempt house can devalue an otherwise decent street. There’s none of that round here. It’s as if everyone just ‘gets it’ in a way the British have long forgotten, or just can’t be a*sed with any more. I reiterate, I’m in an incredibly wealthy, educated pocket of a massively-diverse country…but, to compare, I’ve also come from the wealthiest corner of my own little land, and it shames this English snob to recall the quantities of rubbish routinely lobbed along the South East’s rural hedgerows, when there isn’t a single, solitary speck of litter here - not even the ubiquitous rain-filled, sun-faded crisp packet that appears about every two hundred yards at home. Forced to face the comparison every day makes me cringe with humiliation at how we treat our fly-blown, litter-strewn civic spaces in Britain. Yes, there might be a Victorian water-trough thoughtfully-planted with a few soggy blooms by a dedicated volunteer from the Parish Council - who should be applauded for their effort - but you can guarantee there’ll be an empty alcopop and a bagged -but-discarded dog turd amongst the wilting marigolds.
However, any warm glow of smugness correspondingly experienced by East Coast Americans for their justifiably praiseworthy parochialism should immediately be countered by the sobering knowledge that, in the last month alone, their country’s Supreme Court Justices have:
passed a law saying you can openly carry a gun whenever and wherever you want. (If you take a bag to the shops, it’s because you intend to use it. Does the same intention apply to bringing your gun? Even in a Christmas queue at the supermarket, I’ve never found myself thinking, ‘what I really need now is a gun’.)
struck down a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion or not, whatever the circumstances - and they’re reportedly also turning their 17th-century attentions to:
a) restricting access to contraception (surely if you’re getting rid of abortion you need to make ‘dang’ sure you ramp up contraception-use?), and;
b) reversing the right to same-sex marriage.
Give me a faded crisp packet in a hedge any day. At least all I have to do to fix that problem is bend down and pick it up. The glittering facade of Connecticut’s ‘Berkshires’ and beyond certainly inspires envy, but behind the scenes this big, rich, successful country needs to get its house in order.