No, this is not about class, it's about perception. And it is just about as difficult as are such ideas as time and space. Try to have fun with it.

As you read this, you are most likely in a room. Am I right so far? It is also likely that the room is square, or rectangular, that it has one or more doors, and one or more windows, a few electrical outlets and telephone connections, and a ceiling you might be able to touch if you're six and a half feet tall. You are in A PLACE. If you have been in this place for a few months or a few years, it probably has a comfortable den-like character. And it is reasonable to conjecture that the same fuzzy feeling obtains with regard to the apartment or house in which the room is located.

This is your Base Place, the most primitive of all spaces, the cave, the hut in the trees. It is totally familiar, a retreat, a castle. Some of us may have satellite "familiars" - an office, a cottage on the lake, a lodge, a club, a bar, a pub. Depending on the ambience of the Base Place, satellites might be even more comfortable, even more of a retreat.

But once we leave the parameters of our Base Place (+), we're beginning to explore unfamiliar ground. Our apartment is in a building containing many other apartments (and people); our house is in a neighborhood containing many other houses (and people). Our tenure may establish some degree of familiarity but there is a strangeness out there that we never fully overcome. Now, to expand further, the neighborhood is in a city, the city in a county, the county in a state, the state in a nation. And the further we get from our Base Place the more unfamiliar it all becomes. As we get further, we find fewer of "us" and more of "them". And at some point in that continuum, "us" has become "them", in toto.

What I've described thus far is generic, and only partly makes the point I want to make. Why is it, do you suppose, that some people have the capacity to slice through the barriers of primitive core spaces and to define their personal Base Place as something beyond the core, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the city? How is it that some people can face the prospect of a change in the immediate neighborhood of their dwelling with calm and equanimity while others go ballistic? Is it possible that their own perception of Base Place is broadly enough writ so that they can understand the change? Does it have something to do with the comfort level? Is it related to their having had an exposure to "them" at an early, impressionistic, age?

The range runs from the person who is fearful of that immediate neighbor to the person who truly feels a oneness with all persons everywhere, with every shade in between that you can possibly imagine. Remembering this, we should not wonder at the difficulties encountered when drafting a Zoning Ordinance, or a Peace Treaty. We may all of us walk on two legs but we have different perceptions of place, our place; we have different personal boundaries. And, interestingly enough, most of us don't know what those boundaries are.