Sneetches, elites, and other tribal weirdness

I've been thinking about the bizarre tendency people have to separate themselves into groups, Us vs. Them. I saw a strange example recently in the RV group I'm part of on Facebook. People's minds can do some weird contortions in their efforts to differentiate themselves (the good guys, the elite, the people worth knowing) from the riff raff, the hoi polloi who aren't worthy of being associated with.

I already knew that the RV-ing world is full of ridiculous amounts of elitism and tribalism. The people with the high dollar Class As (the motor homes that resemble buses) are perceived as snobs by some other campers. I'm not sure why, other than the fact that it seems that many of the folks who buy brand new Class As tend to prefer camping at privately owned RV resorts rather than hanging out in state parks or doing dispersed camping in National Forests. But that's definitely not true for all of them -- when we've been campground hosts, there were always a few Class As around. Granted, most were not brand new Leviathans, but they were Class As.

There's also kind of a split in the Class C world between the folks who have the brand new equipment and obsess about keeping it looking like it just rolled off the dealer's lot ("OMG. My decals are fading!! What can I do?") and those folks who have older equipment and stopped worrying about waxing a long time ago. I cannot begin to fathom why anyone would want to wax an RV. . . but then I don't wax my car, and it's only a Focus.

There's the split between the RV owners who obsess about the interiors -- must make sure the flooring is perfect, have to cover the ugly wallpaper in the bathroom with glass tiles, must acquire lots of RV-themed knickknacks to clutter up the place and/or bounce off the walls when we hit some rough pavement -- and those owners who figure as long as it's clean and comfortable it doesn't need to look like a spread from House Beautiful.  They spend tons of time obsessing about decorating, finally hit the road, and then we're treated to posts about an alternator failing or tires blowing out.  Maybe if they thought less about how pretty the inside was and spent more time thinking about mechanical stuff, they wouldn't end up sitting by the side of the road waiting for a wrecker.

There are the RV owners who absolutely have to have full hookups (electric, water, sewer) before they'll "camp" anywhere and there are those who are sure it's not camping unless they're on a dispersed site in the middle of nowhere in a National Forest or on Bureau of Land Management land. You name it, and you've got one group that's totally for it and another group that thinks the opposite.

The weirdest example I've seen lately, though, of someone drawing a line between Us and Them was a dude who advised someone who was new to RV-ing to join an organization that operates RV "resorts" around the country. You pay for your membership and you get to camp at the properties that are affiliated with the organization/parent company/whatever. He laid it on thick about how by staying at these "exclusive" RV resorts you know you're safe because the riff raff like you find at state and national parks are kept out. You know, the resorts are gated and have private security. WTF?

The first bizarre part, of course, is that business of riff raff in state and national parks. If you're staying at a state-owned campground, you've paid for the privilege, and, depending on the campground, it may not have been a particularly cheap privilege. You're also limited as to how long you can linger in those campgrounds. No one in a state park is squatting there indefinitely. It's not an environment that is riff raff friendly. (FWIW, I am interpreting "riff raff" as low income, poor, possibly homeless.)

As for security, you know what you have at the privately owned resorts? Rent-a-cops, security guards whose training may have consisted solely of "drive around once an hour so visitors think we're doing something." I've known people who worked as security guards. The basic requirement for being hired was that they were still breathing and could stand upright. In contrast, if you stay at a public campground -- state or federal -- you're going to see commissioned law enforcement officers coming through on a regular basis. Real cops, not pretend ones, men and women who have had extensive training and actually know what they're doing.  When we camp hosted at a national park, we'd see a law enforcement ranger come through several times a day. They were a highly visible presence and a whole lot more intimidating than a rent-a-cop would have been. Why would anyone willingly delude themselves into believing that they were safer under the watchful eye of a mall cop when they could camp where there's real police?

Same old same old

Well, I survived the return to the cubicle. Gone for three weeks, and it looks like the only living thing that actually noticed I wasn't around was my spider plant -- it had a desperate, please-water-me-right-now expression on its leaves. The e-mail in box had a zillion messages built up in it, most of them exhorting me to attend various presentations and workshops happening around the Large Nameless Agency campuses. The fitness folks are sponsoring a field trip to Kroger in an effort to get people to learn to eat healthier/shop smarter, an endeavor I don't question, but did they really need to send out eight notices (one every other day) trying to suck people into participating? Ditto the multiple reminders about completing security awareness training (bottom line: be afraid, be very afraid). And the new art exhibit in the visitor center. And several new van pools. After hitting Delete numerous times I found myself remembering something I'd heard at a training (Harnessing the Power of Outlook) back in April: the trainer said that sometimes the easiest way to deal with e-mail that's built up while a person has been away from the computer for a few days is to simply delete it all. Good advice for the future, although I may be a tad too neurotic to just jettison everything without first checking subject lines and/or senders.

There was work waiting for me, of course. Two projects. I'd been warned they would be there before I left town. One is a straight forward editing job, but the other is a little trickier: the task is to take a 58-page report that's written in ordinary language by an outside consultant, someone who had never been shown the secret handshake and so wasn't privy to LNA's own special language, and make it look "more governmental." In other words, purge the plain English and insert bureaucratese. Or at least salt it with sufficient favorite LNA buzz words and acronyms to make it look like it actually came out of our shop. It's a perverse assignment. On a very basic level it feels like I'm being asked to do the exact opposite of what a good editor should do.

Of course, if making it more bureaucratic and jargon-ridden lends it more authority so the target audience takes the content seriously the assignment makes perfect sense. But it'll still feel weird.

I am still getting used to being back in Atlanta, too. The S.O. is spending most of the summer up north working on the retirement bunker so I'm now car-less and having to make various lifestyle adjustments. I have toyed with the idea of getting a scooter, but that's not going to happen. So it's Farewell, Kroger; Hola! El Progresso Carniceria y Tienda. The nearest Kroger is a mile away; El Progresso is one block. Of course, El Progresso had an edge to begin with. They sell LaLa manzana yogurt; Kroger doesn't.

Took MARTA home from the airport -- my first experience with mass transit here in Hotlanta. When I prepared to move here, I kind of assumed I'd end up taking MARTA a lot, but then got lucky and wound up with a commute than can be done on foot. The S.O. and I kept talking about using MARTA to get downtown to museums or the Aquarium, but never quite got around to it. (I have a hunch the only time I'll see any of that stuff will be the rare occasions when we have out of town visitors.) The AJC coincidentally had a piece today, A Newcomer's Guide to MARTA, that was kind of fun to read after I'd already gone through the experience of being a newbie, especially some of the "OMG poor people ride the bus" comments. If my experience was typical, I don't know why so many people bitch about the system. Didn't strike me as any worse than any other large urban area's attempts at mass transit, and is a whole lot better than some.

Among other things, MARTA actually has real live humans at the airport to provide help when it comes to stuff like buying a Breeze card, how to get from the airport to various locations in the city, and so on. There were actual people working at the stop I got off at, too. It's got the DC Metro system beat right there. The cars were reasonably clean, the crowd riding the train the usual urban mix for a Saturday afternoon -- some families out with the kids, working folks heading to or from their jobs, a few baffled and nervous looking tourists -- and the air conditioning worked. Same story for the bus I transferred to for the last mile home.

I heard a lot of the same reservations expressed about mass transit in Omaha, Seattle, and Washington, DC, that I've heard and read here in Atlanta: "You don't want to take the bus. Think about the 'type' of people who take the bus." Which is middle class white speak for "Be careful. Being around poor people or minorities will give you cooties." I can understand a certain amount of healthy urban paranoia, but the fear of sitting next to someone who may or may not be poor is just really, really pathetic.