But...It is Broke...!

My small town is charming. Tree lined, sidewalked streets. Family parks and a wonderful town common.

We have four very good elementary schools, a fine middle school and one of the best high schools in the state.

But we have our heads up our...

We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years beautifying our already beautiful, quaint New England town center.

We now have lovely brick sidewalks and crosswalks and brand new light poles with reproduction gaslight housings.

We have tidy benches that are bolted securely in place and strategically placed around town (facing either the roadway or nearby buildings...Godforbid they should face flowers or trees or parks...or each other, fostering human interaction.)

We have planters with the names of those who donated them (trashed every spring by our highly evolved college student population) and one of our walkways, which leads into an especially cute little park, is made up entirely of the engraved names of the loved ones of the people who bought the bricks. In both cases we paid for the installment by the town DPW.

We are also cutting language classes and some of the arts and certain activities because we can't "afford" them (one of the highest tax rates in the state) and there is even talk of closing one of the elementary schools; the smallest one...the one associated with the education department at the university.

What is wrong with us? What the hell is our collective problem?

The United States is lagging far behind other industrialized nations and is being challenged at every turn by the new, former 3rd world, forces in the world; Brazil, China and India.

Those folks all know how to read and write and cipher and think grand thoughts. They can invent and fix and imagine and manifest. They work really hard and prize education. They are not, yet, slaves to popular culture (just wait a few years and they, too, will probably become Disnefied...)

We, on the other hand, spend our money on high school football and i-Pods and McDonalds and brick sidewalks and crosswalks and fancy light poles. Our kids can't read or write or identify Wyoming on a map (remember Pacino's sidekick in "Dog Day Afternoon", when asked what country he wanted to escape to, said, "Wyoming?" He must not have known Dick Cheney lives there...) We're satisfied with a "B "(too bad the world requires straight "A's" to get ahead)

If we, as a culture, don't wake up very soon, all of the beautification will have been for naught because there won't be anyone out and about to use the new stuff.

We'll all be in the unemployment line or in the soup kitchen or in the homeless shelter or hanging by our necks in the garage because we fiddled while our Rome burned to the ground. We'll be a society of Walmart Happy Faces.

Perish the thought!

But we'll deserve it...