Thomas Worcester, SJ
San Francisco, Bridge Culture and Barrier Culture
I recently spent a week in San Francisco, enjoying the arrival of spring, with its lush green grass, wild flowers and blooming fruit trees. It is a remarkable city, with a geography dominated by hills that provide stunning views of San Francisco Bay and of the Pacific; it is a sophisticated urban space very diverse in its ethnicities and cultures. In a time when shrill political voices plot erection of fences, walls, and other structures to impede movement of migrants and refugees, this peninsular city, named after St. Francis of Assisi, remains in many ways a city of bridges, rather than one of barriers. The Bay bridge and the Golden Gate bridge make this symbolically and quite literally and visibly so: the former, stretching east/west across the bay from Oakland and Berkeley to San Francisco, also marks the western end of trans-continental Interstate 80; the latter, built in the midst of the Depression of the 1930s, provides a north-south link of San Francisco with Marin county, Sonoma and Napa valleys, and beyond. The Golden Gate bridge is also a beautiful work art of which one never tires, its red hues and art deco features complementing the hills, water, sun and fog, and other natural beauty around it. It is one of my two favorite bridges anywhere, the other being the Pont Neuf in Paris.
The Depression decade also saw production of the 1936 film San Francisco, staring Clark Gable, Jeannette MacDonald, and Spencer Tracy. Set in the earthquake year of 1906, the film shows a sleazy city of greed and lust, a city in which an innocent girl struggles to make an honest living. A priest, played by Tracy, tries to help her, and he challenges the depraved mores of a saloon keeper and profiteer played by Gable. The clergyman makes relatively little headway, but the massive earthquake in April of that year, and the fires it causes, shake (!) at least some of the city’s residents out of their moral lethargy, and help them to embrace the common good.
And the common good today? If in recent times San Francisco has indeed been a leader in defending and celebrating many kinds of diversity, such as diverse sexual orientations, or racial, ethnic, and national diversity, it has also become an enclave of extreme economic inequality, one where not only the poor and those of modest incomes, but also the middle class, struggle to find affordable housing and to eke out a decent living. Any persons below the level of the upper middle class may wonder if any ‘bridge’ is going to be extended to them that will allow them to actually reside in the city of San Francisco.
If there is a deep-seated divide in the US in 2017, it is likely the division between bridge culture and barrier culture. Bridge culture seeks and values connections with others; it privileges contact with foreigners and strangers and seeks to learn from them; it relies on new technologies and on high-speed travel possibilities to make possible and to promote various kinds of globalization and cultural exchange. Bridge culture values hybridity and the mixing of races and nationalities and religions. It seeks to reduce impediments and obstacles to international cooperation and collaboration. It values the United Nations and European Union as essential to the building of a world that will never again see a world war. It prefers diplomacy and dialogue to an America-first, go-it-alone swagger and naïve self-congratulation. It is suspicious of claims of American exceptionalism, and knows that the US has much it can learn from the experience of other countries and cultures, starting with Canada and Mexico, and then extending to all continents. Bridge culture knows that extreme economic inequality is divisive and destructive of community.
Barrier culture is rooted in fear of the other and in ignorance, arrogance, and self-absorption. Often claiming to be pro-life but in fact eschewing an authentic pro-life culture, barrier culture favors easy access to guns, along with frequent application of the death penalty, and huge increases in military spending. Barrier culture promotes gated communities with private security guards. Barrier culture seeks to make the crossing of international borders more burdensome, especially for certain nationalities. Barrier culture sees the golden age of the US as in the past, probably no later than the 1950s, and it seeks to fence off and marginalize any effort to offer an alternative narrative of the nation’s history. By circling the wagons, as it were, and adopting tariffs on foreign goods and keeping out foreign workers, advocates of barrier culture seek to somehow avoid any global awareness or interaction that could undermine a flimsy promise of restored bliss in the US.
Jorge Bergoglio, a South American Jesuit who chose the name Francis upon his election as pope, has among his papal titles that of pontifex, that is, bridge builder. Like Francis of Assisi, he stands with and for the poor; he rejects savage, unregulated capitalism and its exploitation of the many by the few. He refers to these matters often as he speaks out relentlessly for bridge culture and for the conversion of barrier culture. He is especially eloquent in his passionate defense of refugees and migrants, regardless of their national origins or religion, and in affirming their inalienable human dignity and right to be treated humanely everywhere. Francis seeks not to build walls but to tear walls down, walls that separate peoples from one another. He is a voice for the common good, a voice critical of cultures and economic and political structures that prioritize individual greed and wealth at the expense of the poor. He rejects xenophobia and an exaggerated nationalism that exalts one nation over another, and that makes a supposed national interest an excuse for every type of hatred, violence, division and exclusion. May his bridge-building voice be heard and heeded, throughout the US and the world.