B-Rant

- submitted by S. Church on 03/31/2008

  

Our Town: The Rich And...The Rest Of Us

By Scott Church

I used to think I possessed a healthy dose of self-esteem. I went to some of America's more prestigious schools and did well there. I entered a creative field, started my own company, and had a decent measure of success.

Though hardly amassing a fortune, my wife and I at least were able to earn enough money to move to the suburbs after the birth of our first child suggested the need for better public schools than those available to us in New York City. And so we packed on up and moved to the toney little village of Bronxville, where the median household income currently stands at $163,700 and the median home price is $1.6 million -- a very far cry indeed from the nearby New York City borough of the Bronx, not to mention the much poorer neighboring communities of Mt. Vernon and Yonkers.

It was there in Bronxville, surrounded by lovely Tudor homes, leafy wide streets, and tidy, picturesque neighborhoods, that I was shocked to discover that I had been socially demoted. Once a candidate for admission to the elite, I was horrified to learn that while I wasn't looking I had been reduced to the ranks of the rabble, viewed by my millionaire neighbors as barely worthy of their notice, no less their respect.

Such is life in Bronxville, one of the most affluent communities emanating like so many high-priced diamonds on the crown whose center is mighty Manhattan. It is there, of course, where the real work is done -- or so I am led to believe by my fellow Bronxvillians (Bronxwegians?) -- where real men, and almost exclusively men, make the brief commute to the canyons of the financial district and earn their ludicrously inflated salaries and bonuses by gambling with other people's money, crafting deals with other people's money, and searching for more and more creative and questionable financial instruments to extract yet more money from the great lumbering beast of burden that is the American economy. (Am I the only one who is enjoying every second of the Bear Stearns meltdown? I mean, imagine the gall of it all: The New York Times reported that some of the brokers have even been forced to sell their second homes to make ends meet. Oh, the humanity!)

They stride around town in their tailored clothes, closely attended by their perfectly turned-out wives and their stunningly well-kept children, only occasionally allowing themselves to be even slightly soiled by contact with the chattering masses that labor to serve their needs.

For many of us on the wrong side of the tracks, this largely unspoken snobbery seems to render us simply invisible.

During my child's first year in school, I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to take him to kindergarten every morning. Day after day I would pass the same fashionably clad stay-at-home moms who seem to run every detail of the elementary school experience for Bronxville's youngest students.

I would invariably raise my head, offer a smile, and attempt to make contact of some kind, only to be met by the same 1,000-yard stares, the same gestures of avoidance. Even when I would force the issue by -- gasp! -- actually speaking, my hearty "good morning" would go utterly ignored. (I began to feel a new sympathy for the panhandlers in Manhattan who are routinely ignored and avoided at all costs by the denizens of polite society. I remember an advocate for the homeless pleading with New Yorkers to at least acknowledge that these people exist. Believe me, I feel their pain.)

Perhaps it was the workout clothes I was wearing so I could go immediately to the health club after my parental duties were completed. Did that suggest a lay-about, unemployed deadbeat of some kind? Or was it simply the fact that I wasn't already on the train to Manhattan, like their world-beating husbands? After seeing me at the school again and again, could there be any doubt that I was regularly performing the same chore as they? Or am I just so utterly forgettable that they failed to recognize me as the same guy they kept seeing every day?

At first, I told myself I was imagining the snubbing, but as days and months dragged on and the same people ignored me the same way time after time after time, I found the treatment harder and harder to tolerate. Someone else brings my son to school these days.

The healthy, evolved, self-confident answer to this situation of course is very simple: Ignore the smug self-important bastards, secure in the knowledge that you, of course, could have entered investment banking and made millions too. You too could be wearing the power suits that would demand the attentions of Bronxville's wifely cohort. You too could be tooling around in the monstrous Hummers and Mercedes and Lexuses so favored by the moneyed gentry, bulling your way through school parking lots and church fairs with reckless abandon.

But you made the decision long ago that the pursuit of cash was not going to be your primary goal in life. You wanted to do something more meaningful, didn't you? Something more fulfilling. Wasn't that the idea? After all, it was only the really stupid guys in college who went into business, not the smart, creative, capable ones.

You know as well as anyone that these ridiculous salaries in no way shape or reflect the quality or capabilities of the individuals involved, don't you? Of course you do.

And yet... and yet... surrounded by all the many accoutrements of wealth, it sometimes becomes hard to accept that the majority of your fellow residents have material goods that you can never even hope to attain, that they have the ability to go on multiple vacations to exotic locales that shall forever remain unexplored by you, and perhaps most painfully, that they can shower their lucky children with advantages simply not within your financial means. To say that this constant awareness of financial inferiority can become extremely wearing, that it can at times even make one experience inferiority of a more global nature, doesn't begin to do justice to the odd experience of living in this very odd place.

The cruel geography of our tiny town-just one square mile built almost entirely on a slope-makes all this even more poignant. The higher one ascends topographically, the richer the real estate and the richer the occupants, with the most expensive homes being situated on "The Hill," as it is known around town, and the least expensive homes, such as the one my family occupies, being on the lowest ground, way down near the dreaded railroad tracks. The fact that even these townhouses routinely fetch prices of $800,000 and above, fails to dispel the notion that those of us in "the holler" as I like to call it, are viewed by our social betters as somehow something less than entirely human.

In my occasional agonies over this attitude, I am prone, like Shylock facing his persecutors, to cry out in despair, "Well, go-o-o-olly, Mr. Richie Rich, we's just like y'all, ain't we? We like to set out on the porch of an evenin' in the cool breeze, suckin' on a Bud an' chowin' down on some possum stew just like you and your'n, don't we? Hell, we jes' got indoor plumbin' an' ‘lectricity an' everythin'! Shore, we got a few teeth missin', an' maybe we's a tad too frien'ly with the livestock, but hell's bells, is that any reason to stick up your nose an' ack like we ain't even thar?"

Such an outburst, as personally gratifying as it might be, would no doubt fall upon deaf ears.

Why can't I just suck it up, get over it, and get on with life? An extremely valid question, no doubt, and one a year of therapy might just begin to answer. In the meantime, I continue to live in a place where creative endeavors garner no respect whatsoever, intellectual conversation simply does not exist, and George Bush is still viewed as a great American. But, hey, the school is good, the village is pretty, and we've even made a couple of friends-in Yonkers. Shouldn't that be enough?...read more rants