powerful, thought provoking read, well done

Never stop writing
m

Almost boring, isn't it. That last great upper-middle-class that has now retired, downsized, and moved to white enclaves like Ashland to "get away" from all that is really happening in our great country. Their children and grandchildren will not afford such amenities. Strangely, it is their politics and purchases that has caused this to happen to their own offspring.

You certainly touched on my brief experience returning to Northwestern Wisconsin to teach in Eau Claire production and operations management for a semester to business students. Arriving from Atlanta where I taught in a MBA program to a predominantly black and international student audience, both brilliant and interesting, I was in for culture shock.

My sections consisted of entirely local white students (Cheeseheads) with rather low academic aspirations and a definite cultural blandness that included my cousin, one of the students who nearly flunked out. The only bright spot that I remember in that whole cold (often below zero) spring semester was meeting Dian Fosse (Gorillas in the Mist) in the lunchroom one day, conversations occasionally with the archaeology instructor across the hall, and a Native American female student who stood out among the sea of low achievers for her enthusiasm and uniqueness.

I was never more happy to leave the state of my birth and get back to a multicultural environment once again.

Ron

Personally, I've never understood why we're called white, when we're actually pink in color. Cool write.

You make me dip in my computer Danae, isn't it amazing how every City has it's own scent of racism or not, the meaning of being white has differed much in the history of time hasn't it, alongside every thing else that shift and changes and re-arranges us, I have an old harmonica from a white old friend who fought in world war two. He was buried alive by mistake and clawed his way out. It's an original of it's time, bequeathed to me because we shared a love for poetry, he would sit on his old couch and share with me poems from an old tattered book, how I miss him, that old white man with a heart that never tarnished nor grew old. Have a blessed day, dear one. x

I'm laughing because I did not see the final line coming (slow reader that I am). I thought you had just visited my hometown. But as you know the entire state of Oregon is several light years ahead of the entire Midwest, the South, and everything up to your border. Humility alone backs your words. So does travel to 40 different countries. Another good write.

Yes, it's one of the things I miss as well. Certainly NYC offered massive mixes of people, regardless of skin color. Sometimes I fantasize that someday there will be a law that every city has to carry a balance of mixed ethnic /cultural population or lose the opportunity to vote. As far fetched as that is, as your poem points out, there's something very dark in a community of all whites. Something, as you say, "A few kids here and there With 40-50 something parents. No strollers. They are elitist whites...the goal of far too many.