Why Do You Want to Bomb the Suburbs?
from Billy Wimsatt's Bomb the Suburbs

I say bomb the suburbs because the suburbs have been bombing us for at least the last forty years. They have waged an economic, political, and cultural war on life in the city. The city has responded by declaring war on itself.

Bomb the Suburbs is a message to people who live in the city. It is a call to change your strategy. Stop bombing the city. Stop bombing the ghetto. Stop fucking up your own neighborhoods and taking your frustrations out on those around you.

People who live around you are not the root cause of your problems. The people who are most responsible for your problems don't live anywhere around you and they don't intend to live anywhere around you.

Bomb the Suburbs means let's celebrate the city. Let's celebrate the ghetto and the few people who aren't running away from it. Let's stop fucking up the city. Let's stop fucking up the ghetto. Let's start defending it and making it work for us.

If we have frustrations, we should direct them to people who don't have any real frustrations of their own, people who are so fucking spoiled and so fucking isolated, they don't even realize how spoiled and isolated they are.

Of course we're going to get angry at our families, our friends, that set over there, the teacher, the police officer. But let us remember these problems wouldn't be nearly as bad if it weren't for the everyday cowardice which causes certain people to avoid the whole area where we live, hoarding their resources to themselves.

For all the pain they've caused us, the suburbs deserve to be bombed literally. We're not going to do that. We just want you fuckers out there to understand a few things.

#1. You have problems. One of your problems is that you don't know how to deal with us.
#2. You need to stop running away from your problems. It makes them worse for us.
#3. We're going to start making it worse for you. We're going to keep confronting you. If you run away from us, we're going to keep coming after you.
#4. You may be able to avoid us temporarily, but you will not be able to avoid the thought of us. The price of avoiding us is the fullness of your humanity. And we'll still haunt you with music, our graffiti, and anything else we throw at you when backed into a corner. Your children will cuss you out in language they learn from us.

Gentle readers, please note, the title is Bomb the Suburbs, not Bomb the Suburbanites. We don't hate you. We do hate the way you behave, especially when it ends up hurting people like us and our friends.

You have been trying to tell us to change for a long time. You lecture us about the social pathology of the inner-city and how we need to become more like you. We need to move to the suburbs too. We need to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and abandon our "undesirables" the way you abandoned us.

We need to do this. We need to do that.

We're not the ones who did the most to create the problems. We're trying to face the problems you left us with. We're staying behind and trying to make things better.

We think the suburbs are what needs to be changed about America. We think the suburbs are bad for America.

Socially, they intensify segregation and mistrust. Culturally, they erode the sense of history, narrow the outlook and dull the imagination. Economically, they intensify inequality by isolating the rich and the poor. Then the poor lack access to good schools, hospitals, businesses, police, transportation, city services, concerned neighbors, and any of the things that would allow them to alleviate their situation. The rich lack access to reality and any sense of proportion. They run around in a comfort warp, taking everything for granted and misusing what they have.

1880-1980 was the century of the city. The coming century will be the century of the suburb. We haven't even begun to imagine the new suburbs-based America. City and country alike will be over-run with parking lot architecture. Sidewalks, buses, trains, and other relics of public space will continue to disappear. The distinctiveness, character, and history of the landscape will be washed corporately clean. Security guards and alarm systems will protect almost everything (except for the lives of the poor). Downtowns will become malls.

The ghetto will continue spreading into the suburbs. Ghettos of the next century will look less like the South Side and more like East St. Louis: Bankrupt little shanty-towns. Isolated, without bus routes, libraries, or trash collection.

Suburbanization is not only one of the most important trends of the coming century. It is one of the most important metaphors for where our heads are at these days. Everybody wants to go off with their own group, do their own thing, cut themselves off from everyone else, and cease to be accountable. Every possible sub-group now has its own inward-looking magazine and organization.

I want to live in an America without ghettos or suburbs.