Sunday morning in rural America, a small town in central Texas, a place that's been around since shortly after the Civil War. You can see the oldness around here and in other towns nearby, and like all small towns, some old time traditions hang on. Nobody around here gets in a big hurry, so life here is comfortable (if you don't mind the slow pace). The countryside around here is good to look upon, the weather in always pretty nice, and the people are friendly. From the outside looking in, this place looks fairly prosperous. Few people worry much about the future, don't pay a lot of attention to what's going on in the world around them, and their philosophy is rooted in rural stoicism. You take life as it comes.
So, on this Sunday morning I drove across town to take care of my shop animals, those cats and dogs that expect to be fed twice a day. Chores here at home with animals are done for the morning - front porch cats to feed, inside cats to be fed and let out for a while, check the yard to make sure everything is secure there, and then go to the local donut store for some breakfast. People are stirring around, heading for church, and there's a crowd at the place I buy breakfast . . . a place run by Cambodians. If you get your nails done in a salon, some Vietnamese gal will likely do that, and there's a Chinese restaurant just off the square. Last night at a drive through place, the vehicle in front of me was a big foreign made SUV, driven by a grossly overweight Mexican/American lady (this town his half their numbers), with kids hanging out every window. At the local high school football game a few weeks back, I noticed few white kids on the field for our team. My waiter at the Italian restaurant on the square didn't speak good English when I went there not long ago, and all but one motel in town belongs to Indians. You know, like from India type Indians. A hamburger place on main street is owned by some dude from Afghanistan.
My home town is dependent on the oil business, and when that goes bust, the town takes an economic nosedive. Since some seven highways cross there, we've got lots of trucking companies. A factory outside of town makes big trailers and oil field equipment. We've got sand plants here, those places that supply the sand used in fracking for oil . . . big businesses, lots of money into the local economy. Yeah, things are sorta booming around here . . . and the town is still dying. Dying in the sense that it's no longer what rural America used to be; it's no longer a place that keeps up a culture that became the roots of America. And we all know what happens to a tree that gets root disease. It can stand lightning strikes and survive, blistering winds, drought, all sorts of things, but when the roots go bad, the tree is a goner. America is suffering from root rot, dying from the bottom up, and we're too dumb to see it.
But wait! Not everyone is totally unobservant or ignorant about what's happening to us. Cities, where most of our population lives, can't save America from root rot. They are there for reasons - the need for jobs, the lust for the urban experiene, all that . . . and I'm glad they're there. Cities are also magnets for almost everything that is wrong with us as a nation. Overcrowding is causing us big time problems because people in need flock to the cities. Taking care of them costs billions of buck, and some of those costs are not easy to recognize. I like the cities because I want those people to stay there, not come out here to our rural areas and fuck it up like they have their own backyard. Maybe you've noticed, but city folks are always wanting to dump their waste on the country folks. There's a value out here opposed to that, and I want that preserved. Country culture is important to this nation because we are the root stock, the beginning place, and not because we provide the urban areas with more people. Yeah, we're backward in some ways, but that's not always bad. Somebody needs to take action to save the small towns . . . or we all go down with them.
I welcome the newcomers, the foreigners and the minorities, to small towns . . . but only if they are able to adapt to our way of life. Do it our way, the root way, or don't come. Everything changes, and that's a fact, but we need to resist the changes that tear us down. We need to, but we probably won't, and that will bring about the demise of what made us a great nation. We die from the roots, and I'm not sure we can stop that process. My advice to anyone who lives like I do, in a small town that still has something worth saving is to resist the rot. Hang on, baby . . . hang on.
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