Leave some trace

What your bumper stickers say about you

Today’s accompanying tune: “Yes I’m Changing” by Tame Impala

Change in the wake of the Sawtooth Complex Fire in Pioneertown, 16 years later.

I started putting bumper stickers on my car after a woman at the Yucca Valley post office screamed “Go back to LA!” at me as I pulled into a parking spot. She waved her stack of mail at my windshield and thumped her first on the hood of my car while she told me, in explicit terms, that I was singlehandedly ruining this place. I sat, shocked, in the driver’s seat, waiting for her to climb into her car before I stepped out. She waited, so I carefully approached her and calmly said I had never lived in Los Angeles. It didn’t matter. She screamed obscenities at me while speeding out of the parking lot, and I walked inside to collect my mail.

The first bumper sticker was for the Mojave Desert Land Trust, a local environmental nonprofit that does great work protecting the desert and educating locals and non-locals alike on how to best care for it. It was a way of saying, “I live here, and I love it here.” I was part of this community, or was at least making an effort to be part of it. I cared deeply about the land we were lucky enough to live on, and felt camaraderie with those that had similarly chosen to live somewhere that was a little difficult and a lot inconvenient. We had to have something in common, I figured, to all end up in the same place at the same time.

But the woman at the post office felt differently, and she felt it strongly. She was the kind of angry I typically see in Facebook groups or online comment threads but rarely in the real, offline world. Was this the community I was trying to be a part of? Was the vitriol common in the local Facebook groups simply a reflection of how people actually felt here instead of the unfiltered thoughts of a few keyboard warriors? What was it about me and my car that set her off, proclaimed to her that I didn’t belong here?

This is, of course, an incredibly loaded question. Politics, race, perceived socioeconomic status, outward gender appearances, the fact that I was at the post office at 11 a.m. on a weekday — all of these factors contribute to deeply held beliefs of who does and does not belong in any given community by any given person. I am a generally privileged individual with the ability to slap a bumper sticker on my car and hope that it will deter most of the speculation as to my belonging within this specific community. There are so many others that don’t have that privilege, that hear far worse undertones in the “Go back to LA” accusation based on race or religion alone. There is no belonging to a community based in hate, only deeply exclusionary ties that in turn fan more hate, more anger. That is not a community I want to be a part of, one that no amount of bumper stickers can overcome.

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I have lived in other places that have changed so quickly as to be unrecognizable within a few years’ time. Each place has its unique challenges when faced with rapid gentrification, but the pushback and anger among those who have lived there in the before times is almost always universal. I can understand the deep fear of change they have, coupled with the rapidly rising costs that often come with gentrification and the pushing out of those without financial means — it is deeply destabilizing to feel excluded from a community you used to feel at home in. It’s easier to be angry with every Subaru you see than to think, long and hard, about the systemic-level failures that allow such rapid gentrification — with some people benefiting financially as others are left behind — to happen in the first place. I am not saying those angry feelings are not valid — they are just misplaced, and who they are directed at tells a lot more about the people wielding those insults than they may realize.

At the risk of falling into cliché, change is hard. It will always be hard, and not all change is for the better. That pace at which change has happened here, in particular, is hard to get my head around. I can see why folks lament all that has already been lost to the unending churn of change in the name of growth, of financial prosperity for the town and the area. I’ve grieved towns, cities, neighborhoods that were painted over in the name of newcomers. Here, the stakes are even higher because, like it or not, we live in an environmentally fragile place. Every time I see a new lot scraped clean of vegetation to make way for a new home — one that will likely only ever see Airbnb guests — I mourn for this place, for what we are losing. And yes, sometimes I feel angry.

I am only one person in one community — I do not claim to speak for anyone other than myself. But I do love this place deeply — I think it is a truly unique place full of unique, incredible people that also love it deeply. I understand that not everyone has a similar view — this place can feel isolating and harsh, with few job prospects and fewer resources for those without means. It is by no means an easy place to live. But, as I wrote before, it is not a place that has to make us hard, hard towards each other and hard towards the life we each build here. Like the flowers just starting to emerge, we can come to the table with softness at the center and allow that beauty to permeate our interactions with each other.

My anger at the developers looking to cash in on a quickly ending real estate gold rush, at the landscapers taking an axe to a decades-old cholla on bosses’ orders, at the woman at the post office, does not come out in screams at strangers who I have decided to blame. Maybe it should, I don’t know, but I just don’t feel that yelling at strangers is a productive use of my anger. If anything, it almost always makes the situation worse. I don’t have many answers, just a lot of questions. I want mine to be a useful anger, one that propels me to get involved where I can to try and fix some of the things that make me so angry, to see that change has a positive effect on the community so that it becomes one I am proud to be a part of. Sometimes that means volunteering with MDLT to clean up a popular OHV recreation area that locals cannot seem to keep their glass bottles out of and getting a bumper sticker as a result. Other times it means going to public meetings about proposed new glamping sites and making sure the developers know how this community feels about being counted out. Because if there’s one thing every desert resident knows well — and thoroughly despises — it is being counted out.

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I have since added two more bumper stickers to my collection, both representing communities I am extremely proud to be a part of. They don’t boast achievements of mine, just state my allegiance to places and people I care about quite strongly. They come with me everywhere, telling fellow drivers and denizens of the world what kind of person I might be. I don’t have to scream, because the stickers make polite conversation for me.

Being part of a community, any community, is hard. It requires work. It takes collective effort to create community built on trust and kindness, one that values each of its members for what they bring to the table. Community is, at its core, an inclusive undertaking. To bring others into a community, to build a community in the first place, is an inclusive feat. The same way that a gated community is really another name for a country club — clubs are exclusionary, after all, while communities are not — the same way that communities only focused on excluding others can’t claim the name. There is no community built on hate, divisiveness, or fear. At least, no community that I would ever want to be a part of.

Maybe this is all naïve, a ‘let love win’ attitude that doesn’t take into account all the realities of being human. But, again, I want to choose softness, and this might be one of the hardest areas to do so. To meet instances of hate and refusing to continue spreading the hate forward. To make it end here, with me, in the post office parking lot. To love this place and its people so deeply that I choose the hard work of leaving it so much better than I found it. If that makes me naïve, makes me soft, that’s fine by me.

Here’s to making the right changes at the right times with the right people.

- Megan