TRIBALISM

I am recovering from five days of discord with my environment, which is assumed by some to be an Italian-American conclave. The visuals debunk that assumption. I'm pretty observant, and I'd say the ethnicity of this neighborhood is very mixed. It was once occupied by a larger number of Italian immigrants working in nearby factories. Now the factories are high-tech office complexes with parking lots jammed with luxury cars. The loyal remnant have simply not climbed as far up the economic or educational ladder as those who have moved on or are moving in. 

It's safe to say there is a tribe of generational residents of Italian descent. I believe it would be a stretch to say they are a demographic majority. In fact, their insecurity is revealed when they bark openly against what they call "gentrification". That is code for non-Italian-American incursion. 

The annual festival associated with the local Catholic church occurred last week. Wednesday through Sunday. A carnival was set up in a local park a block away with rides and sausage wagons. A performance stage hosted local acts. It operated between the hours of 5 PM and 11 PM. That was fine by me, actually more civilized than I had expected. I managed to ignore the occasional off-key crooner's warble by wearing headphones. The carnival itself emitted no noticeable sound.

Sunday came with its icon parade and public solicitation of money by the Catholic-Italian-American men's club which hosted the event. A large Virgin Mary with child was wheeled through the streets. An small off-key marching band with an all-too-dominant drum and uniform gray hair accompanied the icon. A charming candlelight procession down the street to the church at 10 PM should have been the end of it. It wasn't.

If this all seems charmingly ethnic, you are missing a piece of important information. Through four of the five days and nights a continuous barrage of firecrackers, cherry bombs and rockets with canon-like aftershocks rattled the neighborhood. It was constant, unnerving and deafening. As celebrants got drunker, the noise intensified. A rocket hit my bedroom window at 1:30 AM and practically knocked me out of bed. It was not charming.

The various Italian-American property owners came out on Sunday. Their minority in the general population of the overall area was made clear. Their obvious intention to assert themselves as the moving and dominant force in the neighborhood was also clear. They established front yard domains where they sat, ate and drank from afternoon until evening. These fiefs were not at all inviting to the outsider. Each passer-by was skeptically scanned, greeted or ignored. 

I was reminded of that town in rural Italy where scores of medieval towers rose up, built by each contentious clan in the town. Even though the town was walled against outsiders, it was occupied by clans within the tribe. Battles were fought between families from the high rooftops. Each new tower rose slightly higher than its neighbor. Our local clans simply blast each other's eardrums with competitive fireworks. 

There is a lot of garbage propaganda these days against American cohesion and nationalism.  It is notably uncivil, riotous and angry. Tribalism is making a comeback, largely due to the inordinate numbers of legal and illegal immigrants who have flooded in. Assimilation is condemned as White supremacist. But is it?

Immigrants have come here for the exceptional American Way. The immigrants of my grandparents' generation, like the Italian factory workers of my new neighborhood, did not want to stay in backward rural environments where clannish behavior ruled. They came to the U.S. to join a society with laws and Constitutional freedoms for everyone. Once tribalism takes over in a place, that universality of civility and respect evaporates. The old "us vs them" dynamic asserts itself. We can see this plainly in today's political discourse. And it certainly exists on my street. 

The assumption by the tribal loyalists in my neighborhood was predictably false. Not everyone wants to get drunk and light explosives for half a week in summer. But the insecurity which feeds tribal cohesion against a perceived common enemy, or change itself, prevents even the more intelligent from grasping this. Habit is their security blanket. Anyone with different ideas can be damned.