From one place to another, as different as they all may seem, each area share many things in common with other areas. Not every town or city is perfect and not every person is flawless. The people of Haight-Ashbury represent the people of the society we have in America. In Joan Didion’s essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” she presents a message that says something about our American Society as a whole.
At the very beginning of the essay, Didion writes, “…It was a county of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements…commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children…abandoned homes and vandals…children were missing…parents were missing…those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.” This quote specifically explains how the lives of many Americans are. If they aren’t living that life themselves, it is something they eventually end up seeing or hearing about at least once in their life. It proves people wrong when it comes to the thought of America being such a perfect society. There is always one sort of problem going on; never is there a time for perfection in a country. California was expected to be the land of gold, where poverty lays nowhere and everyone is happily living their lives. “There are only three significant pieces of data in the world today…God died yesterday and was obited by the press…fifty percent of the population is or will be under twenty-five… third is that they got twenty billion irresponsible dollars to spend,” Chet says in Didion’s essay. What he was trying to say is that out of the many things going on today, those were some things that the society was or will be going through.
America really isn’t the perfect land that many people thought it would be. People didn’t travel to the area just to experience the same things they had in their previous locations. Overall, the perfectly-seeming society is actually imperfect and certain things that happen in one area of the country are most likely occurring somewhere else.
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