Effervescent, bubbly: the Alka-Seltzer of Psychology.

Watching the Science Channel sometime back, you were presented with the plausible theory that a large meteor, colliding with Earth, way back in the day, triggered climatic events that resulted in the extinction of most species of dinosaur. 

Even those scientists who are not certain about the meteor theory are in substantial agreement that literally and figuratively, the climate was no longer hospitable for dinosaurs.  In similar fashion, you have either been hit by a meteorite of awareness or experienced a climate change of a story related to your belief that because you live in a city such as Santa Barbara, you live in a cozy, privileged bubble.  

By no meansis it the same as living in Los Angeles or New York, or Mexico City or even Miami or Boston, where there is enough room for, among other things, ghettos and significant differences in school facilities and hospitals and gated communities.


Ah, see; you have already begun to address the subject.  There are indeed gated communities here and there are differences in schools and there are differences in tax rates and, although you joke about it particularly on Twitter, even differences in YMCAs.  In fact, where ever there are people, there are bubbles.  

Even in such sprawls of bubbles, say the ghettos in Tijuana or Rio or Lima or Johannesburg, where it is entirely likely that many inhabitants will not escape from during their entire life, there are sub-bubbles, significantly better or worse than the norm.  Many of us have some form of passport that allows us to move from one bubble to another, even assuring us a bubble for home, a bubble for work, and a bubble for considering what thing or things we wish to work at.  

We even have some philosophy or operating system in which we arbitrarily admit or deny others access to our own bubble as well as what we like to think of as standards of democratic behavior by which we judge individuals from other bubbles.

Imagine when and if you will the waves of judgment you put forth moving from one bubble to the next, then try your very best to see how your presence causes another to respond, then try to discern how that person deals with you.  Then try to imagine how that person regards you after you have moved beyond the bubble he or she occupies.