ROOT ROT: SMALL TOWN AMERICA IN DECLINE

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.

HOW IMPORTANT ARE ROOTS?

Everyone knows that roots are important to plants of all kinds, but are they important to people?  Oh, I'd say very much so, and for the same reasons most plants can't survive without them.  Take a tree, for instance.  I've studied trees some and was amazed at how complex they are.  In fact, the tree might well be the most dynamic living thing on this planet, and we pretty much take them for granted.  That's stupid on our parts because we can't survive without them, and that's because they are a part of our roots system - that part we're unaware of. 

We usually think of roots as our family background, our social status, our homes and jobs and other things that provide our basis of security.  Foundation, that's the word we most think of when it comes to roots, and that should include our environment and not just our physical setting.  I won't go into all the scientific reassons we can't live without trees.  My expertise in that are is shallow, but it's deep enough for me to know they are part of our root system.  And we are much like the trees, even from a nutritional viewpoint.  Some tree have roots that reach deep into the earth to obtain the nutrition they need, but others have shallow roots.  Would it surprise you to know that many desert plants don't have deep roots?  Take the creosote plant, for example.  It has shallow roots that spread along the ground so that it can catch as much mositure as possible from the infrequent rains that fall.  In doing that, it pushes out other plants that would compete with it for the water or other nutrients.

We're very much like the creosote plant, that little desert bush, in that we do the same.  Most of us have shallow roots that spread, and since there's just so much space available, that means we're in competition with others to get what we need to survive.  To do more than survive, meaning we want to actually prosper, we need to spread more, and that means pushing someone else aside.  It's the way of nature, I suppose, that survival of the fittest thing.  I realize that's the way it is, but I still don't like it.  Perhaps we do prosper by controlling as much space as possible, taking what we need at other's expense, but does that really make us prosperous?

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.  If in time we don't learn to conserve, to take just what we need, we'll end up in a situation where there's nothing left for us.  We're doing that because people are a much worse blight on the earth than is that little creosote bush.  It's greedy to a point, but our greed doesn't seem to have a point where enough is enough.  Think about that, and then take a look at what's going on around you.  Better yet, walk out into the desert and find a nice healthy creosote bush.  It looks pretty good, but there's quite a bit of bare ground around it.  It's healthy for the time being but in time that bare ground around it could be its doom.  Say, for instance, a rancher comes along who wants to graze cattle there, and he thinks the creosote bush is his enemy.  He wants
grass, not an ugly little bush cows don't eat.  Get the point?