Ron, you ask some excellent, and insightful, questions. I'm sorry that some angry people choose to gripe and yell rather than make their own lives happier.
This is my persepctive --
I spent my first 30 years in NYC, where one learns infinite variations on the theme of fear: rudeness, confrontation, antagonism, humiliation, and flat-out
possible danger. Then I worked for 11 years in Tokyo, where the cultural norm is to smile at everyone and touch (in every sense) no one. In your face, vs. nowhere near your space.
In NYC, there were many "slum" neighborhoods, gang neighborhoods, dangerous neighborhoods that everyone knew to stay out of for personal safety. In Tokyo there was no such thing and meandering at any time of the day or night was completely safe just about anywhere except right on the many train tracks. Safety is at home, vs. safety is everywhere.
Then I settled in Seattle. The first time I was shocked out of assuming that
Americans were all pretty much like New Yorkers I was standing on a street corner in downtown Seattle on 4th Avenue, waiting for the light to change in mid-December (rainy season). I'm Caucasian. A much younger African American man in his early 20s standing near me, also waiting, suddenly said to me, "Can you
believe this sunshine??!" And he grinned to the sky. His ease and friendliness instantly released me forever from any lingering expectations that "race relations" here would be the same life-or-death struggle I had grown used to in New York.
In my perspective, here people of all colors, sizes, backgrounds, accents, and whatnots, really do live and let live. That is the
local culture. I'm certain there are many people who are nevertheless angry and choose to behave rudely; I'm also certain that many transplanted people bring unrelaxed social assumptions and expectations with them and keep hammering here even though the local culture doesn't welcome divisiveness or pay attention to such divisive behavior.
I say all that to tell you that this
is a different place. It's not at all like going back in time 20 years when you enter Montana, as they say. It's very up to date here, pretty well educated, pretty articulate, and pretty creative. As a result, there aren't shantytowns, or shacks, or slums, or nasty scary bad-bad-bad places here that I've ever encountered or heard about in my 20+ years here.
I agree completely with the previous post by mthomson that folks here definitely are polite and even warm no matter under what circumstances you meet them -- and also they're not necessarily friendly in the sense of giving out lots of invitations to backyard barbeques. It's not "clubby" here. It's not "chummy". It's not a bunch of people paying breathtaking attention to others' behavior, clothes, cars, children, houses, lawns, etc. etc. etc. The local culture doesn't care very much about comparisons, let alone about being nosey. (As you've noticed, that's not the case when people are spewing anonymously on internet forums, where they can waste their energies whining and smashing. But I suppose that's pretty harmless, too. (And we can scroll past those posts and not read them. The kind of atmosphere I came from in New York had people yelling the same trash into others' faces.)
If you live a life here that doesn't involve trafficking in drugs or other illegal commodities you're not likely to ever have even a hint that any "gang" might exist. I've never once seen any person, or any event, before my own eyes, that looked like anything criminal or malicious, except the dangerous speeding some drivers do on the highways. I think I saw someone start to pocket something in a store several years ago, but I wasn't sure. I once had a daily bus driver on my commute who kept choosing to be cold and silent to his passengers; but in time he was transferred. So if I'm one of those angry people, I'll get on City-Data and rant about how "rude" and "evil" and "completely unprofessional" those bus drivers are, right? Everything is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?
Crimes against
persons here are unusual here. Crimes against
possessions are usually the way crime goes here. Which is relaxing, isn't it? I'd rather lose my car any day than get stabbed... Which encourages me to be smart: never ever ever have an unlocked door on my car or home, or leave anything at all visible in my car or through my windows at home, or put my handbag down anywhere, or walk away from my suitcase at the airport. You know -- all the usual "street smart" things.
I feel safe, every moment, every day, every year. My homes have never been broken into. My car was broken into once, many years ago, and the police told me it was a Tacoma meth gang that was hitting several cities. They ruined my tape deck, but couldn't do anything else because I had The Club on my wheel. Seems pretty tame to me...
Ron, there is a difference
in substance between an old city like all those on the east coast that have evolved through dense populations that have competed for a long time while they paved their paradises, on the one hand -- and a place where virgin forests are
still cleaning the air, bears and mountain lions roam free, and the gentle breeze from the Pacific touches and cleanses everything every day. A romantic view? Maybe it's a matter of perspective?
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Just to put things in perspective..
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