"What the hell do you mean?" I ask, mildly offended. Sure, we have public healthcare but that hardly qualifies us as mothered. God, in some Scandinavian countries the citizens cheerfully fork over half their income so the authorities can do things like buy thousands of bright yellow bicycles for public use (that are then all easily stolen by less-civic minded community members. Apparently the government in question had not considered that light-fingered cyclists might stoop to painting the bikes a less conspicuous colour).
"I mean, your government mollycoddles you to the point where everything is safe. There's always a safety net. Here in Sydney the job I've been working pays me twice as much as what I would earn doing it in New York because the minimum wage is so high. I have superannuation and cheap health insurance. In short, it's not that hard for me to keep my head above water."
"But surely that's a good thing?" I say. I couldn't think Jeremy was more backward than if he'd said, "you know what the problem with Australia is? You have way too much oxygen here."
"Look," he says, "if you're asking me if I would rather live in a society like Australia where I could feel happy and safe and not have to worry about whether I'll get sick or get a job all the time, then, probably yeah. But Australia sacrifices something for that. No one needs to take risks."
It was at this point that I kind of stopped taking the conversation seriously since I had decided that Jeremy felt the need to live his life according to strict sado-masochistic principles of struggle and angst, and it was pointless me trying to convince him otherwise. But something of that conversation always stuck with me, and two years later, living in New York, I think I'm beginning to understand a little of what he was getting at.
My neighbourhood is not exactly ritzy. It's safe, for sure, but it's a little grungy and maybe a little poor, kind of like a cross the Sydney suburbs of Newtown and Cabramatta, if the former had hipsters instead of emos, and the latter was home to several generations of Puerto Rican immigrants. It's noisy, busy and thoroughly lived-in. It also seems to be home to an inordinate amount of a limited variety of businesses. Walk down the street and in one block you might pass a grocery store, a laundromat, a liquor store (no bottle-o's here!), a cafe, and a hardware store, and in the next block you'll pass exactly the same kinds of stores mere metres from their competitors. The same can be said for most parts of New York - I guess the sheer volume of people keeps all these grocery stores and laundromats in business.
The stores are pretty basic. They're not bedazzled with lovely faux-mahogany shopfittings and soft downlighting, they're big white rooms with fluorescent lights and a bunch of stuff on metal racks. In short, the people who own these businesses are poor, perhaps with limited education who can't speak proper English as good as I or youse, and the choice is to either open another laundromat or starve. There's no welfare safety net to live off while they look for a job or go to publicly-funded TAFE (well there is, but it's so woefully pitiful that one can't help but wonder if it's a cruel joke).
But what is really striking about these businesses is that they seem to occupy a fuzzy middle ground between "business" and "lounge room". Anyone who has been to South-East Asia will know exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. They may be poor business owner struggling to make ends meet, but man, are they proud of their business. The shopfronts are just as likely to be decorated with pictures of the owners' kids as the actual stock inside the shop. They keep not just the shop spotless, but regularly scrub down the pavement outside the store. And they're social hubs - the owners sit outside on plastic chairs and talk shit with their friends or family waiting for customers to come, and when they do they stand obligingly behind the cash register until the customer either buys something or doesn't, whereupon they return to the plastic chairs outside in the street. The nights are still quite warm, so in the evening when I come home from a hard day's
I think I'm painting a pretty rosey picture here though. Obviously there's a flipside to this salubrious business model. In Australia business owners can reasonably aspire to the luxury of not actually needing to be in their shop seven days a week from dawn til dusk. If they work hard then one day they'll be able to afford to staff their shop with disinterested teenagers with a faceful of piercings (I'm over thirty, I can say that kind of shit now). Here, the economy isn't as strong as the US government likes to pretend it is (or liked to pretend - I don't think anyone has any illusions as to the state of the US economy any more), and so it's pretty unlikely that anyone around here will ever earn enough from their business that they can afford to support themselves and a staff member. So the buck stops with them.
I reckon it's this kind of environment that has made America what it is today - a nation of self-made men (and of course women too, no sexist connotations, 'self-made men' has a nice alliterative ring to it, that's all. Shut-up, this is my blog). You grow up in an environment with no safety net. Mum and dad have worked hard all their lives to support you and your siblings, and they do it tough. Perhaps out of a desire to make them proud, but probably out of a desire to not have to work every day for the rest of your life, you think 'screw this' and you scrimp and save and work like a dog so you can afford to go to college to get a degree to get a decent job. And the government didn't do shit to help you. You did it all on your own. You can do anything.
So America takes risks. Americans love it when people rise from the gutter and become successful artists or media personalities or politicians or just plain old rich-as-hell. These people are beacons of hope to everyone else who aspires to one day 'make it big'. "If they can, then I can, because it's completely up to me - God knows the government isn't going to help me". Unlike Australia, there's no "tall poppy syndrome" here, because no one can afford to rest on their laurels and shyly suggest that perhaps one day they might like to be slightly famous. If you don't do it, then someone else will, and no one will give a shit that you're still selling drill-bits and curtain rods in the same store for fifty years.
Having read back on all this, it could be misconstrued that I've become one of those Aussie ex-pats that, having left Australia, pontificates from their soapbox safely located on the other side of the world about how they were never appreciated Downunder and that one day everyone will be like "ooooh, why did we not realise what a talent we had? Oh boo hoo hoo, poor stupid us... boo hoo...". I'm not (well maybe a little. But mostly not). I love Australia and all the opportunities it has given me, and one day I want to return and give back what I'm learning over here. Nor would I ever advocate the abolition of welfare or public education or anything like that in Australia. I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps there's a reason why New York is a cultural mecca and Sydney just likes to think it is - adversity makes you strong.
*FYI not all my American friends are composers. I'm not a complete music nerd.
perceptive...
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