The Bubble Generation

Following the "Three Events=Trend" story, we'll take the publication of yesterday's Fearful rich keep poor at bay with gated homes and razor wire story in the Guardian as an excuse to ramble about the phenomenon of the gated communites--los countries--so popular in the Buenos Aires suburbs. The Guardian piece, which claims there to be 400 countries with 300,000 residents, follows on the heels of a February Clarín piece (Ya está fuera de las aulas la primera "generación country") and a Christmas Day NYT piece (A Widening Gap Erodes Argentina’s Egalitarian Image), all of which focus to various degrees on the increasing desigualidad and fear that create and are caused by the countries and the generation of hyper-protected children brought up in the weird bubble of country living. As the Guardian writer Rory Carroll notes:

Those outside the fences joke that the children inside think golf carts are mankind's main mode of transport and have no idea what traffic lights are for.

Film director Celina Murga, 34, who made the lovely, small film Ana y los otros, is now making Una semana solos (A Week Alone), a movie about gated community kids who are left unsupervised. It is, Carroll says, "more Lord of the Flies than Home Alone."

"The children growing up in these places are very different from others, they don't know how to behave in the real world," says Murga. "Instead of trying to build a circle of protection around them we need to build human beings who can deal with the world as it is. I want to show that this is a social crisis."

Not only do the kids grow up in surreal bubbles, the poverty and crime that the residents entered these sealed villages to avoid do not necessarily stay away: the outside castle-like barriers of many countries often serve as the perfect back wall to the shanty town villas oft-founded just outside (see picture, above) and often filled with the manual laborers who work inside during the day. And the crime rate? According to a February La Nación article (En lo que va del año, se cometió un delito cada tres días en algún country), there's a robbery every three days in a country.