Had Sunday lunch at El Chilito in Austin.
Afterwards, my wife and I drove around looking at "the East side" of I35. It's a far cry from where we live, way out West of the city near a suburb called Lakeway. I live in what they call a "gated community". There are many of them, but ours is particularly special in that it has a manned gate. 24x7x365.25 there are always at least two "guards" to keep out unwanted people, like terrorists, illegal immigrants, and Canadians. It's a sanitized, mow-your-lawn-or-else kinda place; like Pleasantville, or Seahaven but not as wild and unruly. It's a mostly white, anglo-saxon, heterosexual, some-kind-of-Christian, fairly-to-very rich enclave. A place characterized by Safety Through Sameness.
By contrast, Austin's East side is what I guess you'd call "colourful". It's earthy, and uncouth; part dilapidated, but part brightly painted and gaudy, although the paint is often peeling. And it's not just the buildings that are "of colour". Back in Glasgow, the local pink folk, like me, live cheek-by-jowl with more recent, and far browner "incomers" from Pakistan and India (who are, in fact, so *not* recent that the national food of Scotland is effectively Indian, and if you hear a local urchin swear "Tongs, Ya Bass" at you before you see him, your guess as to his name being Imran versus Shug is as good as mine). So East Austin felt ... well, a bit like home to be honest.
Look there - a black dude sitting at the side of the road, smoking and reading the newspaper. Further along, an old and shabby hispanic man waiting for a bus. (Bus? You don't get buses in Lakeway. Everyone has at least five cars). Here, a kid poking at a hole -- Oor Wullie style -- in the sidewalk with a stick; there, some guys in coveralls clustered around the open hood of a beat-up car, doing their own poking at the unwilling engine. It has hints of Notting Hill, or Glasgow's own version, The Barras.
Now I don't want to create too much of a rosy glow here. There's a rough end of life to see in the East part of Austin. I've never been there after dark, and I may not want to without availing myself of Texas's concealed handgun license rights. I certainly wouldn't want my womenfolk walking alone in certain areas there. But what I saw as I drove there in the daylight, past umpteen quaint and tumbledown restaurants and busy stores, was the price I paid for the safe sterility of Lakeway. It's a price in diversity, in connection with people different from me (or, more to the point, a lot less different than I may think), and in exposure to all of what is Out There. The original settlers of Texas (OK, not *the* originals -- but John McGregor and the like), were not, I think, Lakeway people. Not in the sense of erecting walls out of fear (well, not fear of Canadians anyway; hoardes of angry Mexicans, on the other hand, well fair enough.)
And then it struck me. Isn't my safe, gated homestead not simply a microcosm of that much larger increasingly-gated community, the USA itself? For numerous reasons, many understandable (hey, I live behind a gate myself, and those Canadians can be nasty), but many tragic and unnecessary, the USA is trying to lock the very doors through which its builders got in. And, as with the microcosm, it's not those builders, the Tough And Manly early settlers, who want to lock the screen porch and throw away the key. It's their meek and mild descendants.
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