So I was thinking about my last post, and was wondering what people were saying about American culture and I ran across this pretty entertaining article by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Here’s a selection.
“While global economies are converging, cultures are diverging, and the widening cultural differences are leading us into a period of conflict, inequality and segmentation. Not long ago, people said that globalization and the revolution in communications technology would bring us all together. But the opposite is true. People are taking advantage of freedom and technology to create new groups and cultural zones. Old national identities and behavior patterns are proving surprisingly durable. People are moving into self-segregating communities with people like themselves, and building invisible and sometimes visible barriers to keep strangers out. If you look just around the United States you find amazing cultural segmentation. We in America have been “globalized” (meaning economically integrated) for centuries, and yet far from converging into some homogeneous culture, we are actually diverging into lifestyle segments. The music, news, magazine and television markets have all segmented, so there are fewer cultural unifiers like Life magazine or Walter Cronkite.Forty-million Americans move every year, and they generally move to areas with people like themselves, so as the late James Chapin used to say, every place becomes more like itself. Crunchy places like Boulder attract crunchy types and become crunchier. Conservative places like suburban Georgia attract conservatives and become more so.”
Can someone please explain to me what a crunchy place is like? That is about the most bizarre yet hilarious sentence I’ve ever read.
