Alternative cultures exist because mainstream culture is alienating

By David McElroy · June 17, 2013

I was talking with a friend Sunday about some things that bother us about mainstream middle-class American culture. She was telling me about having to go to the home of a relative for holidays for years. Everyone was expected to buy expensive presents for everyone at Christmas.

She was describing her sister’s house, which had five bedrooms, five baths, work room, weight room, art room, pool, trampoline, built-in everything, eight televisions with eight cable boxes and a three-car garage.

It sounds like a really nice house, doesn’t it? So why was my friend bothered by it all? And why did the description sound so suffocating and sickening to me?

It was hard to put my finger on it, but I thought about it for much of the afternoon. I’ve thought about this issue before and I sometimes have trouble justifying the revulsion I feel for such things. I can try to justify my feelings in practical terms by talking about the waste of money and resources that go into such places, but the real answer goes much deeper than that. (Here’s another attempt I made about 18 months ago to answer the same question.)

Trying to understand why I feel this way is making it easier for me to understand why punks, goths, rappers and other “weirdos” of the world dress as they do and reject acting and looking like what we consider normal.

There are quite a number of things about modern life and mainstream culture that disgust me — things that make my skin crawl. When I look at the reasons, though, it’s not the cookie-cutter architecture or unimaginative design or cliched photographs on the walls that upset me. It’s what they represent about the people who choose them.

For me, choosing something other than what they choose is the most basic form of dissent from a culture that I find soul-crushing. And that’s what gave me a sudden understanding of and feeling of kinship with groups such as punks.

There are many of us who feel alienated from the mainstream culture. We don’t like the values that we see projected in media or from authority figures or in the things that the people around us focus on. As a result, we feel like aliens in the world.

For me, it’s not even a certainty that everyone else is wrong. It’s more the realization that whatever they are — whatever they choose to be, whatever they choose to value, whatever they choose to teach their children — feels wrong on some basic level. More precisely, it feels wrong for me.

When I drive through your suburban subdivisions, I see beautiful and expensive houses that feel as though they were squeezed out of tubes of cookie-cutter goo. They look alike. They feel alike. The families inside seem to look and think and act alike in many, many ways. I don’t understand the ways that those people act or think. They feel shallow, superficial and dead to me.

So when I’m confronted by things that remind me so much of this shallow culture, those things make my skin crawl. I come to see the things themselves as the things I hate, but they’re not really. The thing I really hate is feeling like an alien who’s all alone and wishing there were other aliens who I could join and feel not so alone.

I don’t want to become a punk or goth or rapper. I don’t want tattoos and piercings. I don’t want pink or green hair. Those cultures aren’t me. But the more I understand the way I feel, the more sympathy I have for the people of the cultures that I haven’t understood — cultures that I’ve sometimes looked down on and judged. They’re dressing as they are and talking as they are because it’s the only way they know to rebel against a mainstream culture where they don’t feel as though they belong. It’s their only way to feel that they fit somewhere.

You hear about people who are square pegs in round holes. Or round pegs in square holes. People who don’t quite fit, but can be forced into some place in life. It’s common. I feel as though the world is mostly made up of round pegs and square pegs — and every single one of them gets pounded into a round hole or a square hole. Sometimes the fit isn’t great, but if they pull out of there, there’s a better fit elsewhere.

I feel as though I’m a hexagonal peg in a world designed for round pegs and square pegs. It’s hard to find a place that fits, because I don’t fit into the mainstream round or square holes.

I imagine the people who end up looking and acting like freaks in alternative cultures feel a bit that way, too. I don’t want to go that route. I don’t want a Mohawk. I don’t want to dress in leather and chains. I don’t want to wear sad black makeup.

I just want someplace to fit. I just want somebody who’s just as hexagonal as I am to search for a fit with. And in the meantime, I’m going to hate the culture and homes and values and possessions of most people I know. It’s not really that I hate you or your culture or your homes.

It’s simply that you remind me that I don’t fit — and that makes me feel very much alone.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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