About the cheesy url – first world problems!

If you grew up in California and wanted to go on an adventure, you were kind of stuck. While your East Coast peers dreamed of riding out West, across the now long-closed Frontier, you learned that it wasn’t fair to call it a frontier, since the Native Americans had been there for a long time – though saying they’d always been there was racist.

Later, your East Coast university roommates were shocked to learn you’d never pretended to be a pioneer. Why would you? You were already West. You and your family had arrived, geographically, and – unlike the Joads – more or less economically.

Instead, you’d pretended to be a vaguely medieval vagabond, until you realized that even progressive Robin Hood perpetuated Anglo-centric and fundamentally conservative ideals. When the real world got too messy, you slipped into other worlds, which seemed safer until you realized the Narnia books were a huge Christian allegory.

So instead, you imagined leading a revolution, only to find yourself wishing that California’s rather inefficient government were a little more totalitarian and worth overthrowing; that you had fewer choices, so that the choices you made would matter more. (Picking classes was never epic.) You would have abandoned your worldly and civic goods to go on a secular pilgrimage in quest of a narrative.

Sutton-who?

You knew you must be pretty spoiled to want fewer rather than more resources and freedoms. These were what they call “first world problems.” Despite your “wealth of opportunities,” you felt you had few chances for adventure.

Your East Coast’s university’s lecture halls and Jingle Balls weren’t quite the right kind of adventure. Still, they fit into the narrative of imperialism and the male gaze that you were learning about in seminars and so helped you, at least comparatively, feel like a protagonist.

Guilt, not from religion but from fear of cultural insensitivity, brought you to a class on Christianity, another element of so many American’s lives that was absent from yours. You wondered, trying not to judge, how early Christians had been so passive, eyes to the sky, awaiting the End of Days, minds empty of agency.

As you discussed founding non-profits in Asia with classmates, you wondered how many of you, in the nineteenth century, would have been officials in Her Majesty’s Empire. Going abroad for adventure could easily go imperialistic, so you stayed in the library, hoping things would happen.

Finally, you realized that you were just as passive as the early Christians. With a background that taught you to question and qualify, you hadn’t dared to create your own narrative for fear it would offend. All your life, you’d been waiting, though you knew neither the day nor the hour, for an adventure to appear.

Moving forward, in a world that rejected ideas of backward and forward, would require a little more imagination.

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Tags: east coast, first world problems, frontier, history, political correctness, west coast

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