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Notes From the Suburbs

Two stories from the suburbs start and end with a kind of randomness, both good and bad. Let’s begin with the school shooting in Santee, California. It’s made me realize the most dangerous place to be these days isn’t the inner city; it’s the suburbs.

Yes, the place to which people fled to get away from it all has now firmly established itself as the place that has the most threatening pathologies. They just happen to be mostly white these days. And in California, that’s news.

Santana High School students huddle in front of Santana High School after placing flowers on top of the entrance sign in Santee, Calif., following a shooting Monday, March 5. Photo by Associated Press.

As the population shifts in the nation’s most diverse state, whites are a shrinking minority. They don’t get the face time they used to. So there’s nothing like the suburbs to remind one of the good old days. Santee’s stats tell it all. Eighty-four percent white and hardly any of those other folks.

That’s what was too bad for young Andy Williams. When people don’t have skin color to draw distinctions, they start looking at other things out of necessity. Things like height, weight. And class.

Among teen-agers it can get down to basics fast. Can you do tricks on your skateboard? Play a lick on the guitar? Score a six-pack?

If not, well, you’re a marked man. As a friend of Williams said about him to the Los Angeles Times, “Even the people who got picked on picked on him.”

When racism isn’t available, Darwinism will do.

Unfortunately, Williams wasn’t terribly sympathetic to begin with. A smallish 15-year-old, he was no saint, known instead to shoot urine out of squirt guns. A charming precursor to real marksmanship. And then of course, there was the name, shared with the sweatered, heir apparent to Perry Como. Williams just wasn’t destined to be “cool.” I suppose this is what made having a 12-year-old girlfriend a natural for him. The weak always find weaker somewhere down the pecking order. The Times reported Williams had been suspected by kids at the skateboard park of plying his younger girl friend with alcohol in order to take advantage of her. The evidence was inconclusive, but in the court of peer pressure, might makes right. Andy was reportedly punched in the face four times for taking his liberties.

What was young Andy to do? He told his friends he would get even with his tormentors. What better equalizer than a real .22? No squirt gun this time. He would go to school and take his revenge. His friends thought he was joking and did nothing.

They’ll never have a career in airport security.

This is what you get in the middle class suburbs these days. Kids without guidance with parents who don’t come in until the 20thgraph of the story.

It’s the now oft-repeated tale of the American school shooting: ignored kids looking for attention, and exerting their power in the form of explosive white male rage.

The community, of course, is stunned. But city fathers still find solace in hanging onto the belief that the suburbs are the all-American anti-dote. Could this really be happening in little Santee? Surely, if it can happen there, with its Little League and soccer pitches, it can happen anywhere, they say, as if to shield the town and share the shame with everyone.

It’s hard to imagine the new hell we’ve created in these all-white suburbs, where busy parents don’t spend enough time with their kids, and the scrawny are made into sport.

These are places where we least expect the alienated because the communities are so homogenous. There’s a buy-in, after all, in the suburbs. Average home prices in Santee reportedly are around$200,000.

But even there, the strong will find the weak. As I said earlier, in the absence of racism there’s always room for Darwinism. And that’s when Andy Williams happens.

In many ways, the suburbs are about living arrangements. They’re oases of class. But even on that score, Santee in Southern California would be considered to be mid- to low-range, at best. In many suburbs throughout the state, especially those in Northern California, the typical rancher is double what it costs in Santee.

But no matter the cost, real estate’s segregating powers are always at work. It gives suburbs the 80/20profile of the California of old. Eighty percent white. Twenty percent everyone else.

But it’s in the 20 percent where we find this week’s suburban hope. Sangmi and Dong Soo Cho live in Moraga, a half-hour drive from San Francisco, in what planning departments call “multi-family units.” Apartments, condos, duplexes. Among the high priced real estate, it’s where normal people can afford to live. Even then, the immigrant family says they live paycheck to paycheck. It’s a sacrifice to pay the high housing costs of the area. Especially if it means your two kids get to go to some of the finest public schools in the state.

But now the financial troubles are over. The Chos can buy a whole suburban block in Moraga’s toniest gated community.

With a little luck, a quick pick, and a random draw, they’re the winners of the state’s $89 million dollar Super Lotto plus jackpot.

The Chos windfall shows that the “feel good” story is not dead in suburbia. Nothing like the immigrant spirit to keep things in perspective.