works archive added9 24 2001

homesick     Alright, so I’ll admit - I don’t hate my hometown. Not in the noun sense, that is. I don’t hate the people residing in that town, or the stores in it. I don’t hate the way one stoplight turns green while the following one goes red. It’s not the total lack of tolerance by the employers and school officials that makes me despise the place. In fact, I have just recently been able to reflect on what it is exactly that I dislike so much about the little stinking insignificant patch of concrete and asphalt that housed and nurtured my being for some 14 odd years. I found that what I really and truly hate about my hometown is the fact that I grew up there.     So many things are out of whack back home. Public school, for instance, is not based on doing the best you can. Elementary through high school simply prepares their subjects for a life of hard labor; of merely getting by. This is, of course, assuming that a majority of high school kids will continue to live out their lives in the same place, working the same factory jobs, and teaching their children the same routine - which is exactly what happens. There is no emphasis on leaving your home and creating your own life. No one pushes you to do the best you can. Mediocrity is commonplace. On the other hand, who can blame the officials and adults that own and operate the factories, the school system, or the government jobs? They are simply insuring the success of their hometown for generations to come.     I suppose some of this would be clearer should I somewhat accentuate the size of this region before continuing. Not in population that is, but in landmass. For example, there is only one public high school available in the entire county and it already houses some twenty-one hundred students annually, with that number rapidly expanding. Poverty kills on one end of the county, while people are flamboyantly wealthy on the other. The factories that employ thousands of residents are shutting down or moving to Mexico one by one. The local government wants to spend more money on building an unnecessary four-lane highway rather than fund services to keep families safe and healthy.     So along with the ironic differences of this large county’s small villages and its hive of nine-to-five human drones, lies it’s horrendous geographical position. Although a short drive is all it takes to arrive in the ever-bustling city limits of Roanoke (where?), one would hardly believe the seclusion and utter solitude of this dentist’s nightmare called Franklin County. Take me, for example, and my family. We live on a chunk of Earth about 30 acres in sum. On my way to school in the mornings, I saw more cows than humans in houses. Ok, you say, so you don’t have many neighbors. Good thing, right? Wrong, for me. Picture this - no neighbors means no neighborhood friends. No neighborhood means boring, which leads to other things like drugs and...hunting?     All in all I would have to say that about two thirds of my friends sacrificed their futures for substances. Day after day propaganda comes over the media portraying drugs and alcohol as some sort of demon force overtaking innocent children while their concerned parents watch in horror, like their kids were becoming disfigured and tortured to death before their very eyes. What I saw more than anything was drunken, uncaring parents whose children were being devoured by self-hatred and bitterness. Drugs were a comfortable escape from that detrimental monotony. So who can blame them? Better yet, who can they blame their decisions on?     I must now cease in this journey through my scattered thoughts and apologize for the way this essay is coming across. All I seem to be accomplishing is complaining about things that are of no real importance. Like I said earlier, I don’t hate the people in my hometown, or any of its institutions like school or the police. It’s not the little things that have made me so pessimistic towards the old homestead. Instead, it’s the way that I feel about myself that causes me to blame that physical location. I don’t like myself as a person, and it eats me up to know why, but as much as I try to discover and attempt to remedy the problem, it just devours me more and more. To impugn something like my hometown makes me feel better, but it doesn’t solve any problems. Yes, there are seemingly a lot of reasons to hate my hometown, but none that hold any real ground. So until I find out what will make me a better person and to ultimately feel better about my unimportant existence, I will continue to pin the fault on those annoying roots that have since sprouted into an overcoming tree of negativity.