(Or: How to Hockey in Your Own Nest)
by JP
So it’s finally right in my face. The world being directly spoiled right here and now. My town. My anti-town. Hockey in your nest is a Jack Saunders leitmotif, of course…it means wreck your home. So I live in a ‘place’ called Okemos which is the fancy high-end outskirts town one step away from the local university, the country place for the country professors—MSU is/was an ag school. The English profs mostly live in town, I think; they bike to work. But Okemos was kind of classy, too, an enclave. It had a high end old fashioned grocery store and department store.
But now it’s finally happened. The rich folks of Okemos have done the deed. Quick money plus mobility equals ruination and betrayal of both their own heritage and the future for their children. The trick is that in developing Okemos, they didn’t have a plan or design, they weren’t making a place or a better place. They moreover didn’t make a place for themselves. They built trash for trash. There’s no more quality old-fashioned grocery store or high-end department store where you used to could buy Weatherby firearms—like our own little Abercrombie & Fitch (the original version). When the rich moved to rural Okemos they didn’t `develop’ around themselves cultural amenities which they would naturally desire. But that implies they possessed more than degrees. That they had culture. That they’d been educated as opposed to trained and brainwashed. No. They had only degrees and money and all they wanted was more money.
So all they built, the only thing they built, the only thing they’re leaving their children is mini-malls and tanning-booths, nail’n’hair shops, a food mart gas station on every corner, quick-change oil shops, video shops, karate studios, multiplexes, an infinity of wide, broad, complex, lonely intersections and pavings, oh, and fast food drive-thrus pricey or pricier. That’s it! That’s our ‘town’. They’re scheming to bulldoze the actual Oldtown Four Corners due to the traffic congestion there. The end result will be freeway-like traffic levels on all surface streets. …But that’s not all! There’s a couple other inexorable processes occuring.
Of course Okemos isn’t rural anymore. Farmers can’t afford their land anymore. Offers they can’t refuse. We’re rich, ma! So guess what? The next little rural town out is getting the million-dollar enclaves now, as the rich flee the mess they made in Okemos. And they’re seeding the quaint downtown with more quaint shops, heck if it isn’t quaint it need not apply. And fast-food drive-thrus. And oil changes shops. Surrounded by pavement. Not like the old town. No facade. Pure facade. A whole new paradigm: “we have no choice”.
The rich build what they don’t need or like but which will make them the fastest buck. They destroy where they were. Then they leave.
Actually, they’d been leaving the whole time. The rich, being suckers and morons, have been DRIVING the whole time anyway. (And they’re so leveraged none of them even have drivers.) The rich go to dinner via the freeway, they drive 50 miles to their reservation. The hubby drives 50 miles east to work 7 days a week. The wifey drives 50 miles west. The kids don’t even go to boarding school. They’re drugged out at the hick school coz eduation doesn’t matter anyway…well, we quintupled the school millage and built new schools so the hick schools are world class now anyway. So when the traffic gets to be too much, the rich just build again in the next town out, transfer jobs maybe, kids go to a new hick school. Mobility and trash.
With all the poor folk working two jobs hubby and wife in imitation of the rich dipsticks: so they can have the satellite dish and the franchise, too, someday, and have a home built by an exit, and move just like the rich. Augering in. Auguring in?
Here, son, all this is yours: cretins, fumes, isolation and blinking lights.
But the joke is on us. It’s where we’ve fixed up our shack, where we walk and ride our bikes. Where we’re raising OUR kid? But the only hope has to come from those who STAY and STAND and throw their bodies into the works. Ouch.
