I was just looking through a few old family photos, matching them up to current google street views, and I discovered my great-great-grandfather's house in San Francisco is still standing, and it sold for 1.8 million dollars last year.
When my dad's aunt sold the house many, many years ago, before I was born, it was not that special. The house probably looks better now than it ever did, even new. It's a painted lady.
My last immigrant ancestor (and one of my few documented ancestors) was a mail order bride to Salt Lake City. She didn't like sharing a husband so she ran off with a monogamous man and they homesteaded land that's still a long ways from the nearest WalMart.
Most of my immigrant ancestors didn't want anything to do with Europe, the East Coast, or the U.S. Civil War. Apparently they jumped off the boats and otherwise ran into the western wilderness. Their descendants emerged a generation or two later as ranchers and dairymen, some of them with fanciful tales of respectable European heritage, and nobody confessing (in public at least) to the impressed sailors jumping ship, the bastards, the draft dodgers, the Irish radicals fleeing the English hangman, or the ordinary poor and ragged people just struggling to survive and risking everything in their escape to America.
I find it a little disturbing that it's possible to prove and disprove some of my ancestor's tales with an internet search, sitting here at my desk. It seems we've given up some of our freedoms by stashing all that documentation into giant computer databases.
You can hardly leave the U.S.A. anymore without it being recorded somewhere. A few years ago my brother and his wife were driving into Mexico. The U.S.A of course takes photos of you and your car as you are leaving and your license plate number is automatically added to a database. My brother, who is a either a cowboy or biker depending upon which way the wind is blowing (and looks the part so well he's played bit parts as rough cowboys and bikers on television), flipped off the border cameras as they were driving into Mexico. Our border guards, who are not known for their sense of humor, pulled him aside when he re-entered the U.S.A. and gave him eight hours of shit, probably because he dis'd their authority.
We're living in the dystopian "Papers Please" society today, a dystopia we U.S. Americans once claimed to despise. Orwell's 1984 arrived through the side door, and it's because so many of us are cowards.
My grandfather had different birthdays and names on his California Driver's License, his military records, and his Social Security, which caused my dad a lot of trouble when my grandpa passed away. My grandpa was born at home, no witnesses outside the family, and being an incorrigible sort (like my brother) his parents sent him off at age 16 (plus or minus a few years) to live with an uncle in Wyoming. I think he was the last generation who could successfully recreate themselves, names, birth dates, birth place, etc.. It's not that he was a duplicitous man especially, he was after all an Army Air Force Officer in World War II, and later an engineer on the Apollo Project (because he'd acquired a knack for working titanium and other exotic metals in ways that will never be explained), it's just that sometimes he felt the need to reinvent himself.
I live now in a city that's primarily Mexican American. 40% of the schoolchildren don't speak English at home. Everyone has undocumented friends and relatives. White guys like me are not a majority, but we are still privileged. The guys in charge of most institutions and large businesses tend to be white men, very protective of their boy's club, even if they are unaware of that. (Somehow white guys are always more qualified than anyone else whenever there's an opening at the top.) They don't tend to live in the city, but in gated communities in the hills overlooking the city, and pity is they don't see anything unusual about that, even those who consider themselves liberals.
My wife and I live in a neighborhood of skilled tradespeople, nurses, teachers, etc., sandwiched between places where the homeless people live under tarps and very well managed subsidized housing. I like it here, it's real, I like the sound of Mexican music Friday and Saturday nights. We all have bad dogs (mine howl at police sirens), our next door neighbor's have a sweet pit bull not raised to hate, and other neighbor's little yappy Mexican purse dogs who think they are rottweilers and I hear them barking right now.
I don't think I'd be comfortable in my great-great-grandfather's house today. Wealthy people live there. The cowboy is strong in me.
On the other hand, as a lefty left coaster, I think a few of those BLM sagebrush rebellion occupiers and their supporters ought to have been threatened with hanging.
I like to think most of the cowboys and hunters in my family respect the land and don't want to see it degraded, and are willing to contribute their fair share in maintaining it and exclude the takers.
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