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I think it is more about the dissolution of regional distinctiveness, and lack of tolerance that follows from that, because every place and people is assumed to be the same, or should be.
My (boomer) mother grew up in a Southwestern American city with a lot of hispanics and very few blacks. She speaks Spanish badly, but my grandparents spoke it fluently (none of us are hispanic). When Bussing went into effect, she had to sit for an hour on a bus every day to move from one majority hispanic school to another, and the main change was not being able to invite her classmates over, because they lived too far away. Her opinion on bussing is that it may or may not have made sense in Alabama, but it was stupid and wasteful in her city. I took busses all the time as a teen, though they're hot and not very efficient. "Brown people" is a stupid category, but New Mexico and Arizona hispanics love their automobiles -- low riders, trucks, mechanic jobs, custom details, the whole package.
There was a woman in one of my social groups, born in Africa, went to a college in the Great Plains, living in a former Spanish colonial part of the American Southwest, going on about her experience as a Black American and her Blackness, and her sensitivity toward people curious about her background, and it was so very tiresome. None of her ancestors were American slaves, or suffered from redlining, or were discriminated against in any way. None of our ancestors owned a plantation. Nobody in our state was involved. And yet here we all were, unable to talk about any of our actual histories or the places we were actual from, because of her feelings of Blackness.
For a while, I lived with an Albanian family in rural Kosovo. Everyone was very nice to me, and I especially liked that I didn't have to drive or own a car at the time, and I could drink a 50c macchiato at a cafe over the course of an hour without anyone judging me for it. That was mostly because everyone was poor, though. They were upset over having their village shelled, and that for a while they had to teach their language in basements with only a single book for a room full of children. This may be peripherally related to pensioners, but it seems more related to feeling responsible for people who are deemed backwards. Which is, yes, also a problem in many American cities.
The American West has in some sense always wanted cars, even before they were invented. Horses were adopted with great enthusiasm the instant they arrived on the continent. And so were cars. Phoenix isn't full of cars and expansive, flat suburbs because of "boomers." It's full of cars and boomers and suburbs because it's in the middle of an enormous desert. Arizona spent 20 years building the CAP canal system, not for boomers to spread out (although they do), but because they're in the middle of an enormous desert. Boomers from Arizona and Texas drive RVs around for the same reason. i don't think this is necessarily grounded in unusual narcissism, but simply in unusually high wealth.
My mom also has anecdotes about bussing an hour one way to a distant schools with slightly different racial proportions. For seemingly no benefit to anyone. Having heard various bussing anecdotes has put me in a very cynical mindset regarding technocratic solutions to social problems.
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Thanks for your perspective.
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