Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

Brazil was the first place I ever saw a man living in a cardboard box. It was 1965 in Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, and I was twelve years old and freshly arrived from western, upstate New York, a place that would today be called ‘exurbia’ by the pundits. Thus, while I was born in France I had lived almost all of my short life in the kind of place that apparently elected George W. Bush to a second term (some would argue ‘first term’ as more accurate) as president of the United States of America. So it is fair to say that I was as American a boy as could be imagined, from my passion for the slugger Roberto Clemente and the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team to an almost complete ignorance of the outside world. My small childhood exurbia was a subdivision called Big Flats, and in many ways Big Flats was more mid-western than eastern, a place where the slang, pace and sensibilities had more in common with rural Ohio than almost any city or virtually anywhere in Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Jersey.

But the man living in the box was a shock. I had wandered off to check out the neighborhood and I found the box-home not far from the elegant hotel in the center of the city where we were staying until my parents could find a house. He was lounging, reading a newspaper the way my parents might have done back in our old home in Big Flats, casually, nonchalantly. The box was ordinary pale brown, perhaps a refrigerator box, open at one end only. Inside he had constructed a sort of nest of blankets with a few cans of food constituting his pantry. While I was startled, no one else seemed to notice, passing by the way we might have passed a Salvation Army worker at Christmas time back home. On the way to Brazil we had stayed in New York City – my first visit there as well – and had done a lot of wandering around there too. Of course I was awed by the size of building and the shear number of people in New York, but I had seen no one living in a box anywhere. That day in Sao Paulo I watched the man in the box for a while wondering what he would do next, curious about what he did when he had to go to the bathroom or how he could entertain his friends in such a place. What, I wondered, would he do when his kids came home from school? I left disturbed –in this country ( a dictatorship at the time, by the way) the rule was clearly ‘every man for himself’. I also recall feeling grateful, and somewhat superior, because such a thing was not possible in my country.

I am now fifty years old and have lived and visited many places in the world. So while that initial sense of nationalistic smugness has been under assault for some time now, Tuesday, November 7 marked its total demise. We have now decided as a nation that in many critical arena – medical, housing, education -- everyman is for himself. Ironically, Brazil, with the recent election of Lula" Da Silva, a left-leaning president, is now, at least officially, moving in the other direction. Worse, the places in the United States that allegedly elected the man who best represents ‘everyman for himself’, George W. Bush, the so-called ‘exurbia’ are themselves the physical manifestation of ‘everyman for himself’ or, at least, every race and economic group for itself. I have written in the past of what I see here as the movement away from the give-and-take characteristic of a vital democracy where all interests compete peacefully on a reasonably fair playing field to the balkanized, sterile, stratified communities of today. The conservative columnist David Brooks writes in his op-ed column of November 9, 2004, in the New York Times that the United States is decentralizing quickly. He writes that more and more Americans are moving from cities and suburbs to places, “with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture, and intensely enforced social equality.” Well, as noted above, I have long been familiar with such places and have a different interpretation. Rather, I see such places as the new face of racism and social inequality, places to move to when you no longer want any part of the sometimes messy give-and-take of democracy, preferring instead a feel-good refuge, protected from the ‘others’ increasingly by guards and gates, but more often by high residential price tags. Worse, with exurbian office parks, gated communities and outlet villages, the interaction of all citizens in the collective commons is increasingly a thing of the past. Big Flats was one of the original ‘exurbias’ and it was not until I left there that I encountered anyone who was not of my race or comparable economic status. Like the young Sidhartha, aka the Buddha, my eyes were opened to the world, good and bad. Sadly, I have watched as we in the United States are increasingly choosing the worst and rejecting the best. Brazil, in the final analysis, was an amazing place with some serious flaws, many of which were the result of being a dictatorship. What is tragic is the realization that even while Brazilians are now becoming increasingly aware that their country and democracy is not viable without the rough edges and the sometimes-messy interaction of all groups and interests living, working and playing together, we are moving quickly in the other direction. They appear to recognize what we seem intent on ignoring: each man living in a box is actually a crack running through the foundation of a democracy.