Before i begin, a disclaimer:
I have lived in southeastern wisconsin for my entire life, much of it spent sprouting among the fields and streams of what was once called the countryside. It was a land i loved. In many ways it is responsible for who i have become and as i hope to explain, that's both a good and bad thing. I still love it but it has become something that i've been haunted by because, well, i find it a bit of a ghost of its former self. So I write this with a sense of loss and love but i maintain that the people who live there, for the most part, are a fine bunch, even if i do find them a bit misguided. If this is read by those in southeastern wisconsin, particularly my friends and family, I'm sure I'll be branded a bit of a traitor. Whatever. I love you guys and i love my country but i just don't find much of it left anymore and i'm a bit angry. I guess the word i'm looking for is nostalgic but at the same time i feel like america itself, with wisconsin as a microcosm, is losing some of its identity in the rampant and juvenile pursuit of growth for growths sake.
Okay. On with it.
I've been away for a few years, one state over in Minnesota - land of the hated Vikings. In that time my infrequent visits have witnessed some shocking changes to damned near everything from Madison to Milwaukee and Chicago to Saukville. This is a huge stretch of land but for reasons that absolutely boggle my understanding it's becoming so much smaller. It now feels like the ideal of the american dream, as popularized by TV, Radio, Martha Stewart and G.W. America has fallen out of the sky and carpet bombed the entire area. Once scenic drives have been covered with highways, McMansions are everywhere and, like rabbits, breed at an astounding rate, Stripmalls that remain mostly vacant seem to be spawn from freeway detritus as if the offramps themselves have grown appendages. A common joke has become - when you plant a Walmart its weeds - a bank, a Car Tires, Battery Plus, Sams Club, etc grow along with it.
Okay. I know its a common complaint. I'm definately on a very crowded soap box here. Let me just try and state that I don't believe for a second that this is just a problem of corrupt city planning, or a philosophy of 'keeping up with the Joneses.' I believe that, at it's core, we're looking at a crisis of identity. No i am not going to launch into an 'American Values' lecture. It's pointless. In fact it's worse than pointless. There never has been, in this country, anything in it's history that would ever lend us to believe that we've had something like a set of cohesive values. In fact, if social history shows us anything about our country it is that there have always been a fracture of values some of them slamming straight into each other.
When i was a kid growing up in small town america of southeastern wisconsin, the forests and landscape was a phenomena. It was a daily living experience, one that provided enormous comfort and delight and fueled imagination. It was a place of escape, of worship, of life, of direct and tangible experience but also of necessary fear - which only served to fuel the fun. I could walk out my door, grab my bike and in seconds be on a back trail somewhere. I could be up a tree, or just sitting calmly by a river, listening to my thoughts, breathing in the cool, feeling very quiet. It became a part of my identity, a part of who I was, and ever since then I have gravitated to places where I felt that people understood the sanctity of those things.
These days those same places where i wandered happily and got lost have been paved over. All over southeast wisconsin this has happened, to the point where i have only the memories of those things. As a people we don't seem to see far beyond our front door. We manicure our lawns, afraid of what the neighbors may think if we don't. We grow our stripmalls conveniently within reach of our magnificent, if dubiously built, homes so that we may scurry out, procure what we need and scurry back, in time for the football game. As communities we enact ordinances on house color, the height of road signs, the size of shrubs in the front yard all in an epic quest for what? Living each others lives, i think, flattening the spiritual, psychological growth of each other until it becomes a dull grayish aesthetic past that covers everything with sameness.
So basically, that's it. I think all of this growth is a loss of ourselves. The more we lose ourselves with this careless planting of weeds the less we can possibly have of ourselves in the future. It is an utter failure of our society to even consider experience. Is it an experience to drive to a Walmart or a Sam's Club? I suppose it could be. Is it an experience to live in a house that looks exactly like your neighbors, same hedges, one of four possible colors, slightly different floor plan, sleeps twelve when there are only three? Again. It could be. But i don't think so.
It is character that makes us as a society. It seems to me that my country and my state has been living in a state of fear about it's character. We've paved and smoothed and flattened its rough but beautiful edges, thrown bridges over its brooks, planted buildings over its fields, grown condos and mansions on ridges and in forests. We are systematically assasinating the character of the land and in doing so we are murdering our own wonderful identities as individuals. We are becoming mundane, indistinguishable, the living dead, surviving on the brains and souls of those more vibrant than us, and on stolen moments of experience that lift us out of our early graves into a fleeting experience of delight.
It is environment caring for you, teaching you daily, guiding you and growing you in it's character that creates you and makes you strong and willing and able to experience yourself wholly. We desperately need people to admire good architecture without fearing it, to believe that the purpose of the forest is to be the forest, to believe that a road doesn't need to be straight or fast, and that an open field is not an empty canvas for a third rate starving architect.
Things will grow of course, things will be built, bridges constructed, towns will overflow their boundaries. These things must and will happen but it is unconscionable to our identities as human beings to do so without heart. This isn't a simple lesson in aesthetics or a polemic against urban sprawl. It is a necessity that we open ourselves, become MORE human rather than less, and learn not how to change things to how we want them but how things as they are can change us into how we wish to be.
That's all for now.
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