bad facelift

I was not having the best of days today, so I decided to take a walk and have an attitude adjustment towards the positive side. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

I live in a small townhouse complex, on a busier street, that borders a beautiful little community of homes that take up a space of about three blocks by six blocks. The homes were built in the 40’s and 50’s. They are single story homes that, I would guess, are no more than 2,000 sq ft, each one with a front and back yard. For the time these were built, they were luxurious, upper class homes.

I love walking in my neighborhood. On a nice evening like this, families are out walking. I have the occasional run in with a neighborhood animal; there is Ace the Mastiff, Elvis the cat, Jelly the poodle, and the new grey kitten who I have seen, but not met. There is activity in the homes, smells of good food cooking, gardens being watered. There is the occasional remodel that doesn’t fit the aesthetics of the neighborhood, but you try to let it go, to appreciate the uniqueness of this community.

My bad mood had a brief respite when I noticed, for the first time, an amazing tree house in the front yard of a home. I stood underneath it imagining the sleep-overs the children had over the years. I imagined the joy of the family putting on a small addition, or fixing a repair. Everything about it spelled out community and home and a connection to nature, because by gosh… YOU’RE IN A TREE!

A block later, I met a new dog and his owner; Gus the German Sheppard and I have no clue about the human’s name. I got into conversation and learned that they had lived her for 35 years and when they had moved in, all of their neighbors were the original owners. He then proclaimed… “I think we sold our house today!” He then volunteered the information that he was approached by and sold it to a big contractor that bought it to tear it down and build a bigger, McMansion of nondescript style… my words, not his.

Needless to say, my jaw dropped and I think I spewed out something along the lines of…
“But, why would you do that?” His reply… “that’s the way everything is going. The way of the future is a bigger home. You can’t sell this kind of home anymore.”

Is that true?

When I think of America, I think of communities like the one I live by. When other countries think of the small, apple pie, hometown America… they think of communities like the one I love by. Why are we changing how we look? Has the internal substance changed so much that we have to change the outward appearance to reflect the inner. And, if that is the case, America, I don’t like what you have become on the inside.

Why do we need big homes? There are only two reasons I can come up with. First reason, that we consume so much that we need that much space for all the crap we collect. Instead of buying quality items that last forever, we buy crap from Ikea that is replaceable every few years. And, then, ironically, we feel bad for wanting to throw it away, so we stick it into storage to make room for the new stuff. The second reason is that we don’t like being around each other and so we need a big enough space to protect us from our neighbors and the other members of our household.

But don’t you see what it is doing? We are erasing our history. In my opinion, we are telling the rest of the world that even WE don’t like OURSELVES. How shameful. We really should be disgusted with ourselves.

And, the environmental cost of tearing down homes and rebuilding with all new material is unquantifiable. Then we turn to other countries and tell them that they must follow the Kyoto Protocol, when we are so unwilling to do it ourselves. When have we become such a “do what I say not what I do” kind of country? I also wonder if this happens as much in other states, or if it is California trend. And, the only reason I bring that up is because we take such pride in the efforts we make to be “green”. But, I guess what is done behind closed doors, doesn’t count.

I am sorry this is such a rant. In a matter of minutes, I had this experience of sharing the epitome of my community with the tree house, to walking slam into a wall of gluttony and greed, and it upsets me. I walked home wondering if there were any hope. If we could actually turn this around, and by “this” I mean our inevitable extinction.

Please, please, PLEASE… I beg of you to open your eyes to what we are doing to our home. I implore you to start participating in your existence. Stop fucking around in the world of “someday”. Get off your ass and realize that someday won’t exist if you don’t figure it out NOW.

update 8/8/08: I was able to take a picture of the doomed house today. I think we can all agree that it is really sad that this adorable house, full of 50-plus years of history is going to be no longer….