A Death in the
Country
by
Kenny A. Chaffin
All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kenny A. Chaffin
America has
been eviscerated and no one noticed. Our small towns are dead, or dying. As I
look around what was once the vibrant town square of my home town there is
nothing, the shops are boarded up or have ratty looking second-hand shops. There
are nasty looking, too-steep wooden ramps mounted on the four or six steps (depending
on which side of the square you are on) leading up to the sidewalks in front of
the dirty windows, the boarded up shops and the dregs of those few souls still
trying to somehow make a go of it with an indoor garage sale. Only two
legitimate businesses are there, The Madill Record and the bank – now renamed
but in the same place, with the same ‘drive
through building’ banking where I had my first checking account, my first car
loan from the then First National Bank of Madill.
The square
was once a vibrant center of commerce, civilization and communion. There was
the TG&Y 5-cent store, The Corner Barber Shop with its spinning red, white
and blue barber pole, the Dry Goods store, The Madill Flower Shop, Parrish Plumbing,
the Art and Nick-Nack shop, Rexall Drug Store and another dozen smaller shops
selling everything from garden seeds and gardening trinkets to a watch shop. It’s
all gone, all boarded up, all broken windows and falling down facades. And we
wonder why angry displaced troubled adolescents shoot up our schools, our
theaters and each other.
Our stores
have been replaced by Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, Safeway, Kroger and Amazon. We
are homogenized and categorized and targeted and sold by the daily assault of
media that tells us what we need to know, who we are and what to pick up from
the grocery store. We no longer know the clerk behind the scanner which tallies
and totals and assigns and tracks all your purchases even though that clerk may
be the single mother that lives next door with her parents because we no longer
talk to our neighbors and that clerk has been instructed by corporate training
to never get personal with the customers and if she does she will lose her job, her way to feed her son and her American Dream of finishing night school,
getting a degree in nursing from the community college because there are a
thousand others waiting behind her to take that job.
The daily
news is full of doom and gloom, there is no hope, unemployment is up, earnings
are down, the stock market tanked and homes are being repossessed. Oh and the
CEO of Leman Brothers got a 5.6 billion dollar incentive bonus. Good news for
him.
Everything
we see on TV, everything we hear on Radio is targeted to tell us who we are,
what we should do, what products we should buy and how we should feel about Uzbekistan.
Oh and let’s throw in a little high-calorie “Dancing with the Stars” or “Meth
Dealing for Christ.”
We no
longer have time to discuss the weather, politics or new products with the Dry
Goods seller or the neighbors we meet in the store, because there is no store,
and we don’t talk. We don’t know what others think or feel, we don’t share our
day-to-day trials and tribulations with our neighbors or friends we’re too busy
getting to work or dropping the kid off for music lessons or hockey or football
or picking them up and grabbing dinner from McDonalds so we can get home in
time to watch “Lost.”
WAKE UP
PEOPLE! We are all ‘lost.’ We’ve lost
our way, we’ve become sheep, herded and guided and fleeced. No one knows who
they are, only who they are told to be and when someone breaks out of the trance
it is all too often a Nathan Dunlap or a Adam Lanza or a James Holmes. It’s
1984. We’ve forgotten how to live, how to communicate, how to support one
another. We are dying from the inside out. Just look at our small towns.
About the Author
Kenny A. Chaffin writes
poetry, fiction and nonfiction and has published poems and fiction in Vision Magazine, The Bay Review, Caney
River Reader, WritersHood, Star*Line, MiPo, Melange and Ad Astra and
has published nonfiction in The
Writer, The Electron, Writers Journal and Today’s Family. He grew up in
southern Oklahoma and now lives in Denver, CO where he works hard to make
enough of a living to support two cats, numerous wild birds and a bevy of
squirrels. His poetry collections No
Longer Dressed in Black, The
Poet of Utah Park, The Joy of Science, A Fleeting Existence, a collection of science essays How do we Know, and a memoir of growing up on an Oklahoma farm - Growing
Up Stories are all available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007S3SMY8. He
may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com.
