Perspective, Perception, Reaction

Androscoggins River separating Auburn and Lewiston; You are looking at Lewiston.

Downtown Lewiston

Please see borderline pretentious hypocrisy on next page.

Perspective shapes perception and perception directs reaction. In other words, my position in life affects the way I experience life and how I respond to life. Maine life so far is inconsistent with my perspective which disturbs my perceptions and leaves me a bit paralyzed and overwhelmed to react.

For example, a good apartment in L/A is very different from a good apartment in North Carolina. Most of the people that would be reading this blog have heard somewhere in my process of relocating here that I have been stressed out TO THE MAX about finding a place to live. It seems like every place I've been has been gross and ghetto and old and rundown because housing developments are plentiful and constantly springing up in North Carolina; my perspective is that affordable housing should be simple but nice, so I perceive these places as being dilapidated pieces of awful. As another example, I expected Maine to be a wealthy state because the Northeastern culture I've heard of is blue-blooded and Sperry-Polo-Pearl wearing (IIII go to a country club, thiiiings don't apply to me). These types are perhaps in areas that can tap into the tourism market in some dimension. Everywhere else I've been seems economically unstable. Lewiston is very poor. Auburn is better, but its best is like North Carolina's lower end. 

I can't stop thinking when driving around Lewiston that it could be a very cool gentrified town like some rough Charlotte neighborhoods that are becoming hipster/artist/faux-politically-savvy-elitist  reclaimed and revitalized (NoDa, Plaza Midwood). There is a huge human capacity to do work here because there is so much unemployment and there is a huge structural capacity to do work because there are old factories and mills that are unused EVERYWHERE. It would take something bigger than an influx of small business to revitalize Lewiston as it is now because there is not much of a middle class. I mentioned in an earlier post that I went to Freeport and visited the L.L. Bean flagship store. While I was there, I was disappointed to find this company, a business that bases its branding identity in being a Maine institution as much as the lobster is a Maine institution,  imports a great deal of its goods (to be fair, they do make some of their items in Maine like snow boots I'm going to buy; #hypocrite). Give jobs to India, China, Italy, Brazil, and Canada, ignore a major resource 30 minutes away. The cost of labor wins. United States citizens lose. I don't think the mills closed down due to environmental restrictions so I wonder why those resources haven't been used yet.

More thoughts on perspective and perception: At this point, I have come to understand that Maine has been very generous in its welfare system and it is economically depressed because of it. In conversations I've heard people say that hard-pressed people come to Maine because of its government's generosity, but that its benevolence is not sustainable. This leads me to believe social government is not a friend to the Mainer, but rather a time-dealer; enough time to keep people's wheels spinning but not enough to actually go anywhere, enough to enable but never to set free from the tyranny of poverty. 

Anyway, enough of being a grandiloquent (looked that up in a thesaurus) little twit because I'm still new to Maine life and I probably mostly just like saying things that will make people think I'm insightful. What I do know is this: I am earnest in the passion I feel toward my current perception, and open to the fact that my perspective may need to shift in order to accurately experience this new and foreign New England life. As some guy named Arnold H. Glasow once was quoted to have said on a poster I read at medical office, "The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion." 

Here's to educating myself and staying forever moderate/vague.

JB