I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around being back in my native state, more specifically: living in Palo Alto, on the Peninsula south of the city I called home for many years. It’s been fun being the social anthropologist at times, comparing habits and customs of west and east (New Yorker drivers honk and rush and won’t let you in; San Francisco drivers brake for hallucinations and potential pedestrians, as if forever making way for ducklings; Silicon Valley drivers, most in BMWs etc. don’t honk but will not let you in, either, tight grimaces on their faces say I’m an engineer at Google and we’re curing cancer!)

Last week’s Silicon Valley piece by George Packer in the New Yorker was most instructive, at times literally: I had noticed, at a railway crossing near my house, a guard was posted after the local high school got out every day; he was conspicuous in part because he was one of about four black people I have seen since I moved here. Packer reports that after a wave of suicides by stressed-out seniors, whose dot.com daddies would not forgive them getting anything less than a 4.0, the school hired someone to keep kids from throwing themselves in front of the commuter train. Seriously.

This is not an indicator of an enlightened society and Packer’s portrait of the newly minted millionaire (and billionaire) class that drive the economic engine of this area as well as SF makes for rather depressing reading. (As he drily noted when an entrepreneur touted how he could now make reservations for a restaurant as he was driving there, most of the problems being solved are those of wealthy twentysomethings.) The reaction here has been somewhat predictable, with a number of wags pointing out that they can’t link to the article because it’s behind a pay wall. And paying for content is just wrong.

True, the libertarian strain of Silicon Valley may not see the point in empathy for the under (or for that matter, middle-) classes, and in that I include most writers; and the beauty and resources of this great state have always been in danger of being bagged by the highest bidders. A lot of the people he talked to couldn’t even see why they should care about the poor, let alone Pakistan.

I had to make a trip to the bank this morning to set up an automatic transfer from our account to our landlady’s. The Chicano guy helping me marveled at how much we were paying to live in a so-so part of town and then told me his story; born and raised in Menlo Park, his parents lost their home about five years ago. The family went its separate ways, he himself lived in his car for a while. Now he lives in Fremont, on the other side of the bay, where he can afford a one-bedroom place, and with the salary he earns he is helping his parents get out of debt. Tell me, is there an app for that?