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Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

That wouldn't work well. I was in Texas during 9/11 and they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars because the locals don't really have a good eye for different ethnicities. Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since.

Austin has grown a lot since I lived there are a lot of people from outside Texas have moved there so I'm sure the culture has changed - but when I was there going from north Austin to south Austin seemed to be this epic trip the locals would only do on a weekend -- and probably pack water and sandwiches for the drive across town. A really exotic senior trip "abroad" for students might be to Houston or Galveston. You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.

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This sounds nothing like my experience living in Austin 2009-2017. In fact, this is unrecognizable.

> they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars

Weird. This is sort of unbelievable. I think I know many Hispanics who lived in ATX during 2001, but they’ve never mentioned their car being firebombed.

The only part of that story that sounds plausible was:

>>You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.

That sounds nice though.

Not sure how serious you are, but on the chance you are...

The meeting spouse in grade school/not worldly typically implies not leaving the area they grew up in at any point. I grew up in a smallish town where this happens frequently. So many people never leave the state let alone the country. Some people never even left the county. Their biggest travel is for school sporting events.

In otherwords, it's not really a term of endearment as much as another "bless your heart"

I still think it sounds nice.

Is the place you grew up intrinsically so much worse than the rest of the world? Would it be so bad to be invested in a single community for a lifetime, and to have a deep connection to the people there? I feel like I lack that, deep connections where the pull of cultural influence goes both ways. I'm not convinced that the cosmopolitan breadth of experience we may have gained outweighs the deep experience of locality that we sacrificed to get it.

> Is the place you grew up intrinsically so much worse than the rest of the world?

For many people, the answer is a pretty definitive yes. I grew up in apartheid South Africa and left mainly to escape two years of compulsory military service helping enforce apartheid rule.

But if you speak to immigrants in any first world country, you'll find lots of similar stories. People having migrated because of severe political or economic issues.

> I'm not convinced that the cosmopolitan breadth of experience we may have gained outweighs the deep experience of locality that we sacrificed to get it.

What stops you going back, in that case?

I'm sure you realize that going back doesn't take away the years of wandering. You've moved on — in my case, I've spent almost thirty years in different communities, marrying a wife from far away with her own family and community, moving several times, making new friends and losing touch with old ones — and, possibly more importantly, the community I grew up in has moved on as well. You know how Heraclitus said, "No man ever steps in the same river twice?" The community you grow up in is like that; to remain in the same community, you have to stay in it, be carried along with it, and change with it, or when you return, you return to a community changed in ways you have not experienced.

I grew up in a smallish town where this happens frequently. So many people never leave the state let alone the country

So, you're extrapolating your personal experiences and applying them to everyone on the planet.

Many of my family members met their spouses in their home town. They hardly ever leave that town. They might fly to another country for vacation once a decade, but otherwise find complete fulfillment in the place where they live. Several have never even bothered to get a drivers' license, because they never found the need to have one.

By your standard, that makes them unsophisticated. But they're probably not. They live in New York City.

I doubt it. Doesn't match up at all with my experience in Dallas in 2001...

Indians or Middle Easterners I knew were not infrequently misidentified as Mexican (as was anyone of Hispanic but not Mexican background), but the idea that anyone would be so unfamiliar with the sizable Hispanic population to do a "black/white/terrorist" identification and firebomb "all the Hispanic people's cars" is hard to believe without some news articles discussing this as a big trend in 2001 Austin.

> "I was in Texas during 9/11 and they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars" That's odd, I was living in rural TX when 9/11 and don't recall anything happening like that. And more than half of my coworkers were Hispanic. I remember a few people attacking Sikhs or other vaguely-Asian convenience store owners, not Latinos.

> "Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since" I suspect your experience wasn't very representative. After all, Texas has a 40% Hispanic population. Assholes won't be calling them terrorists, they're much more likely to be working them like slaves and paying them scraps off the books.

I suspect the biggest reason for a cross-Austin trip being an event has stayed the same: terrible traffic.

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