...so I was drunk in rdrama/motte BotC server one day and promised to write up a post-level critique of the American middle class. Of course, the "project" kept getting bumped for the sake of far more important things, such as drinking joylessly while reposting telegram posts on shitty drama discord servers, this being a far less effort-intensive way to anger people. However, today I suddenly felt bored enough to actually remember my prior commitments, so here it is:
Lawns are fucking moronic. Just think about it - if you put like 20% of Cook County lawns together and combine all the land, money, and effort that goes into their maintenance into something actually useful - you'll have a fucking Disneyland with a Champs-Élysées annex. But nooooo, this isn't good enough, because that would be public and not MINE, MIIIINE, MOOOOOOOOOM, HE'S USING A TOY THAT'S MIIIIIINE!!!
Worse yet, if I were to personally decide "fuck this, this is retarded, I don't need this shit, there's a perfectly good park like three fucking blocks away - I'll just grow potatoes or something else actually productive on this plot" - a formless, permanently scowling creature - the dreaded bored HOA housewife - is sure to be crawling out of the woodwork in seconds, with a clipboard and her trademark Karen-y bangs. And she'll instantly begin to shrilly preach about how something so unbelievably ludicrous could not possibly allowed under any circumstances, because, god forbid, other Karens looking for a place to live will drive past and certainly think "waah, waah, this is proposterous! Potatoes?! I can't even! I need everything to be exactly uniform!", leading to her pride and joy, the land value of the lawn containing her shitty cardboard box with fancy beige siding - will go down. Un-acc-ept-ab-le!
This isn't really my main point - it's just an absolutely phenomenal illustration of why the American middle class is the worst fucking socioeconomic group to ever live. They are petit bourgeois to an extent (primarily in their deeply rooted insecurity and precarious status), but their sensibilities are worse than that - they see themselves as some sort of smaller-scale genteel manor lord, whose lifestyle they so artlessly attempt to ape - but they lack the taste, the resources, or the confidence to actually do that. So instead, they ape the simplest bit - a manicured lawn that said gentleman would use for playing cricket or going on mid-afternoon horseback rides or whatever the fuck it is that those inbred bastards do there - but without the space to realistically be usable for that or really anything else outside of serving as a glorified litter box for the family dog.
And yet they do see themselves as above everyone else. They are aggressive about it, too! “Look at me, I have made it, I have my lawn. Mine! MINE! I won't live in a pod like those disgusting city-dwellers, ugh!.. I'm a real American. This is real America! I like my Bud Light Coors Light, my pickup, my Jesus, and my Red Lobster! Oh, and my vastly superfluous rifle collection! My office plankton job makes me inherently superior to those dirty poors, who just lack my good, old-fashioned work ethic, or they’d be able to file regional shrinkage dynamics reports just like me and become productive members of society!”
To sum it up, the only real question is... Why are they like this? Who hurt them? What possible calamity has caused them to become these incredibly shallow, yet exceptionally vain shells of something vaguely resembling human form? Perhaps we’ll never know.
I am, however, interested in your guys’ opinions on the subject!
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Notes -
I happen to agree with your overall point, but I think your post breaks basically every rule that this website has. This is not Rdrama. Your post is almost entirely sneering without any actual arguments.
In my opinion, the actual arguments are quite clear, but you're welcome to ask for clarification of any points you believe aren't sufficiently supported.
I would like a clarification on how resources utilized on lawns could be repurposed toward something you think is useful.
Well, space is by far the most obvious one. 20 floors of 100m3 flats is infinitely denser than 200 lawns. The remaining area could be used for public spaces, with actual attractions and/or purpose. Effort is a bit more complex, but just think of it as the case of economies of scale - individual lawns will take a lot more total man-hours to maintain than an equivalent public space, even if the latter has considerably more "things" to take care of.
So standing here in 2023, how is Cook county Illinois going to utilize these resources. Do you want suburban housing demolished and larger capacity units built instead? For the effort component while 'centralization' of lawn service toward a community green space could free up resources such as man-hours I don't see how an extra hour of free time per week per household would change anything in the grand calculus of life.
That would be ideal. Larger capacity also fixes the mass transit problem, as denser areas are much easier and more cost-effective to connect.
As part of a grand realignment it would actually be quite significant. Keep in mind that commute would also significantly decrease (denser, closer, better transit, etc) and public spaces would improve.
But high density housing already exists in Cook county, residents have the choices to move there if they would like. Destroying existing housing is not efficient. Wouldn't it make more sense to amend zoning laws and allow developers to build high density housing where demand allows? You're willingness to destroy these communities and your vitriolic descriptions of these folk (with spurious associations) make me suspect your aim is instead punitive. Since you have the option of living in the city, what does the existence of suburbs and your cliched description of it affect you when you may simply avoid it? I'll add a counter argument by saying that to my understanding the problems of the Windy City are not the result of its small size and a tremendous latent demand for high density housing; so while adopting your schema may create some efficiencies in city administration, other underlying problems affecting the Chicago would still exist.
Well of course it does, the "nuke the suburbs" is an intentionally inflammatory conversation starter, hardly practical (or even desirable) in reality. Yes, housing needs to get a lot denser, but it's a lot better to do that through gradual growth of existing high-density areas outwards than through trying to fill the entire metro with flat blocks.
The reason that isn't possible is due to the oversized influence lawn enthusiasts yield over the cities. So the high-density, actual, urban core suddenly stops in quite a few places.
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