I don’t know why I watch “Weeds.”
But that’s actually a topic for a different post, why I watch something I can’t stand.
What is bubbling forth from me right now is a visceral, teeth-gnashing hatred for the theme song, “Little Boxes.”
I grew up in a “Little Boxes” land. As a teenager and young adult, I had all the requisite contempt for the place where I grew up, the lack of culture, the brain-deadening sameness.
Then I got a job, got debt, got tired, got old and got the fuck over it.
Granted, I still don’t want to live in a Little Box. But that’s aesthetics, that’s taste, it’s not necessarily values or morality or anything that presumes one way of life is superior or inferior to another. It’s just a different set of choices.
I mean, sure, my job is often dealing with the kind of people the song Little Boxes is about, and I do get frustrated that so much of my waking life is spent talking to people who have a different lifestyle to mine, one that I can’t really relate to.
But I at least have the self-awareness to recognize that’s just my own form of tribalism, liking My Kind over The Other, and making the traits of The Other repugnant.
It doesn’t mean I am right, that God and Jesus and Buddha and everyone else came down with a notarized certificate indicating MY choice of not living in a Little Box is the Ultimate Correct Way and all those who live in Little Boxes are the heathen damned.
They’re just fucking people living their fucking lives.
And my own experience, having grown up in that kind of environment, having lots of friends who grew up in that kind of environment, is that while we did all go “to the university” we did not “all come out the same.” We’re leading pretty different lives on different continents. Sure, we have similar privileges based on our class and our education, but even the friends who chose to continue living in Little Boxes country aren’t mindless unthinking drones.
Are some people in those Boxes mindless unthinking drones? Sure, as are some of the people in the walk-up apartments in Manhattan or a favela in Brazil. There will always be people who base most of their choices on conformity, on sticking with what their neighbors and ancestors have chosen. And there will always be people who want something different. ALWAYS.
Little Boxes made of ticky tacky don’t create complacency. A…what would be the opposite? A mixed-use community, an urban environment, does not innoculate its inhabitants from complacency.
So the self-satisfied judgment of that song, the way it’s condemning all those people because they “all look just the same” WHILE IT’S JUDGING PEOPLE BASED ON HOW THEY LOOK is just so incredibly aggravating. Especially since the very first line contains the words “on a hillside.” You’re not even there! You’re THAT far away and you can tell all this about the hearts and minds of these people.
Their houses might be Little Boxes but you’re the one putting labels on them.
