People will call the police on you in the suburbs for spitting on the sidewalk. I jest, but it’s not nearly as far from the truth as one would like to believe. The police are the enforcers of the illusion of the suburb; it is the illusion of peace and goodness. It is illusory because there is a hidden violence that keeps unwanted elements of the suburbs out and the lifestyle that suburbanites enjoy is based on a global system of exploitation.

Are the suburbs really a good place to raise your kids? I would think they would be bored to live in a world where anything out of the ordinary is systematically kept out. A suburb adjacent to me banned razor scooters, those little things that kids would ride around and which were popular around the time of the late 1990s. Perhaps the residents were appalled to see children acting like children and enjoying their childhood?

The suburbs have become a world of Amazon boxes and video game systems, and business-wise it has become a place where even corporate behemoths can’t compete against the convenience of Amazon and its ubiquitous oversized vans. Technology empowers suburbanites, but they do not know what to do with their power. It seems like the people of the suburbs are retreating from some fact of life, that there is a tendency to suffer from some fundamental error that blinds them and which encroaches on them at every turn, but which is met with denial and escapism. The power of technology is immense, but it is wasted in the suburbs while in the cities we seem to be falling into some kind of cyberpunk dystopia ruled by technocratic manipulators.

I say “seem” because I do not know what it is like to live in the city. It is foreign to me, as I am so (dis)comfortably tucked away from reality in my bedroom community. Usually reality is distant, but even here, I see reality is catching up with us: everywhere you go, you see panhandlers in intersections just trying to get some money together to survive. Inflation is high, thus the price of food is high, the price of housing is high, there are immense problems with debt. Everyone knows this but in the suburbs people seem to try to turn away, but the time is coming when they will have to face the reality of human suffering, of the horrific toll the human species is having on the Earth to maintain this retreat into illusory safety.

Small problems are what are addressed in the suburbs. Are there people loitering in a certain area. Oh no, we can not have loitering. Is X person not mowing their lawn and making the neighborhood look ugly? Does Y family have a car that’s been sitting in their driveway too long? These become issues of actual contention, the kind of problems that are focused on while the big existential problems are ignored by going to church and trying to pray them out of existence, or by smoking immense amounts of marijuana, or retreating into a technological hyper-reality.

It’s incredibly depressing to see humanity whimper itself out of existence in this manner and to be a part of it. Much could be done to make life interesting, beautiful, and meaningful, but in the suburbs everything seems to go in the opposite direction. Not only are things uninteresting, ugly, and meaningless, but any attempt to change this fact is met with fear and stamped out, and this is considered to be how one lives the American Dream, which I’ll admit has been revealed to be little more than a sick joke to those listening by the influx of information about what America has truly been about.

At least the Nazis couldn’t complete a genocide: America is the land where the genocidal maniacs won, and the horrific doldrums of the suburbs is simply the kind of world that was created when the native population was decimated, nature was paved over with asphalt, and the beautiful prairies were turned into pristinely mowed lawns.