De-Bourgification

The day before yesterday Anne and I took our daughter and her old pal to the downtown mall. We parked in front of the Daily Camera building, customary gathering place for the hippies, street musicians and vagabonds who pass through town every summer. We grownups had a couple errands to accomplish, so we told the girls to meet us back at the car in an hour. As we parted ways I wondered aloud whether it was a good idea to set up a rendezvous point in the midst of this crowd. “What’s the matter with this crowd?” Some young dude sitting under a tree clearly took exception to my attitude. Um, er, well, nothing, but they’re young, see? So be nice to them. The dude, smiling, said nothing.

Boulder is a capital of American bobo culture: plenty of liberal-thinking, art-film-watching, tree-hugging, Whole-Foods-shopping, mountain-bike-riding, SUV-driving, skinny-latte-sipping lawyers and entrepreneurs and stay-at-home moms. But this is also a university town that boasts a storied heritage of beat writers, Tibetan Buddhist gurus, ski bums and hippies. Soaring real estate prices have exiled most of the real bohemians. The downtown pedestrian mall is definitely a bourgeois haven, lined with pricey boutiques and trendy restaurants. But every summer the hippies make the pilgrimage to Boulder, where they hang out on the mall and make the locals just a little bit nervous.

Now we’re back in Boulder, artsier, edgier, poorer, more bohemian than our prior bobo incarnations. But our brief exchange with the dude under the tree made clear to us that we’ve still got bourgeois instincts. We should have been attuned to the opportunity of engaging in a possibly fruitful conversation. Or at least we should have been able to see “this crowd” less as a potential menace and more as fellow travelers. It’s time to de-bourgify ourselves.