The most depressing place in the world
You think you’ve been to a depressing place? Wherever it was, I can top it.
And I’m not even talking Third World, Mogadishu-Rangoon-Lagos depressing. The places I’m thinking about are in modern, democratic countries, and every one is in North America.
All kinds of candidates come to mind — my mind, at least: Baltimore in the early 1970s, even before Randy Newman’s eponymous song (”Hooker on the corner/Waitin’ for a train/Drunk lyin’ on the sidewalk/Sleepin’ in the rain”); Carlsbad, Calif., in the 1960s, arguably one of the very best places in the world (and not only then), but the very worst place in the world if all you (I) wanted to do was grow up and get the hell out of it; Mattoon, Ill, in the late 1950s, a place I’ve never been but will never forget thanks to a line in “Low & Outside,” a memoir by former minor-league pitcher Jerry Kettle: “If I wanted to give the United States an enema, I’d put the tube in Mattoon.”
But the most depressing place in the world today is Vancouver, British Columbia.
Ever been to Vancouver? Spectacularly beautiful place. Miles of waterfront, almost all of which is not only visible but accessible to the public; breathtaking and meticulously maintained parks; an efficient, affordable, and city-blanketing (above and below ground) public transit system; a magnificent, (fairly) new public library right in the heart of a sparkling downtown; clean streets; an enlightened program to shelter the city’s homeless; urban planning that places more and more emphasis on walkways and bike paths; an energetic, ethnically diverse population; health care for all its citizens (they’re Canadian, after all); young, progressive, can-do mayor Gregor Robertson. (Compare to the at best well-meaning Jerry Sanders, or to our imperious, aggressively ignorant County Board of Supervisors. Then sigh.)
And as if to rub our SoCal noses in it, Vancouver is mounting a gung-ho, popular effort to become the greenest city in the world, as chronicled by Allan Hunt Badiner in a July 30 AlterNet post. Cumulatively, Vancouver’s projects make our baby steps toward Going Solar, however commendable, look pitiful.
In short, Vancouver is what San Diego could have been. For anyone who loves San Diego, that’s … depressing.
Now, I’m not one to point fingers, to place blame … no, wait, I am; that’s what I do. So let’s start with the leadership: In general, the officials who run this city, and this county, are and have forever been snuggled into the deep pockets of developers, who I won’t even bother to blame because they do what they do, and what do you expect, anyway? The very notion that we could even consider walling off what’s left of the waterfront with hotels and a massive expansion of the convention center pretty much says it all. Yeah, it would probably make some rich people richer, but all the rest of us live our lives here. That should count for something, and it does, in places like … Vancouver, British Columbia.
But in the end, or, more accurately, in the beginning, we San Diegans vote for these people. Somehow the belief that the marketplace should make our decisions for us - money talks, suckers shut the hell up - has trumped the very notion of community. It’s the attitude that we’re all on our own, and this entity that we call “San Diego”? Well, that’s just a convenient name for the space that, individually, we carve up and sell off. Of course, people live here, too. If they can afford it. And if they’re really well off, they might even get to see the water.
It is for this reason that, when flying into San Diego from Vancouver, one can look out the window at the startling green of Balboa Park, downtown’s scrapers of a medium-low sky, the glistening bay with its bobbing boats, the blue-gray ocean - all that beauty - and declare, a la Bette Davis, “What a dump.”
