I spent my childhood in a town so white that you'd get snowblindness walking down Main Street. Our diverse racial groups included Italians, French, English and Germans - none of whom actually spoke any language or dialect other than American. Intercultural events consisted of talking to the occasional migrant farm worker, or having the one black kid in the class do show and tell about Kwanza - which his family didn't celebrate.
We didn't really have buses, save for the yellow kind kids take to school.
Needless to say, intelligence, curiousity, and talent were regarded with suspicion, and when I turned 18 I got the hell out of there as fast as I could. I made my way to San Francisco. Why?
'Cause everyday, I get to sit on the fetid Muni and listen to a million different people from a million different places push and shove and curse at each other. Ya know what?
It's fucking awesome.
I love watching the way chinese women steer their tight, disapproving mothers through the foot traffic, holding them tenderly by the arm; how the black gangstas rap spontaneous poetry out over the diesel grunts; how the Indian shop owners will talk to you about politics you didn't even know existed; watching those incredibly vibrant latino murals flow by on the sides of buildings; seeing russian grandmothers chortling in knots of twos and threes; seeing the big white guys in leather jackets juggling cell phones and PDAs and smiles and arrogance and guilt; hearing the lilt of Irish and Zulu mixing with Spainish and Catonese as the arab girls peek shyly out from behind their veils and damn, ya know what?
You can have my seat. I don't mind standing. I don't care if you're asian or european or african or australian or american. I get to live in the most incredible city in the world, one that wasn't engineered to some hypocrisy of race religion, but one that we've all effing built, one that wasn't colorblind, but more Colorful than any other city on the continent. Yeah, it's noisy. It's crowded. And people can be bitches.
But so can you, right? Be honest now... ;)
And the majority of people of whatever ethnic group you come from are gonna be bitches at least 50% of the time.
But the other 50% of the time, they're incredible. They're tender, kind, compassionate, loving, intelligent, spontaneous... they paint, they write, they come up with incredible ideas, and even make some of them come true.
By the virtue of luck or effort came your way, you're living in a city that is influenced by the great ideas of almost every culture in the world. Why? Because the members of almost every culture in the world are pushing and shouting and talking and laughing together on these buses.
And if the noise and confusion and rudeness get to you, go spend a couple of days in my hometown - or in a small town of whatever monoculture you come from - and I guarantee that after a week you'll be dying of boredom, and in two, you'll be talking to anyone you can about how many cool people you know in SF and how much you miss it here.
In a month, you'll start talking about how efficient the Muni is ;)
So Jesus, stop pointing fingers, at "X"ians or whatever. You're just really pointing at yourself. We're all San Franciscans, and none of us are less for it.