Our Town

Newsletter 2024-02-05

I’ve done a lot wrong as a parent. Unlimited screen time. Questionable bath enforcement. Letting Halloween candy count as a full meal multiple days in a row. It might be easier to list what I’ve done right: I’ve raised my kids in one house for their entire lives. That’s the end of the list. Our humble abode might be loud and dirty, but it provides my children with stability. Not literally, since it’s constantly shaking from various children body-slamming each other, but metaphorically in the sense that they’ve only ever known one place as home. I hope my kids will stay local when they grow up and move out, but it might not be easy to convince them to stick around. All teenagers hate where they grew up, but around here, it’s the old people, too. We have one of the most negative community Facebook pages I’ve ever seen. Based on the comments, everyone here is mad about everything, which is par for the course for social media but still hurts my civic pride in my adopted hometown. To keep my future adult children here, I have to prove the haters wrong. That should be easy enough. People change their minds all the time on the internet. There’s no way they’d double down.

My wife and I chose to live in this particular suburb because we thought this would be a great place to raise a family. Okay, we didn’t put that much thought into it. We looked at Google Maps or the equivalent pathfinding method back in the day—likely a pirate map hand-drawn on cracked and yellowed velum—and determined this town was the most convenient location to split our significant commutes in opposite directions. Having picked this place, we set about convincing ourselves this was the best option and all other possible choices were inferior by comparison. It’s the same process I go through after buying any piece of technology. As an Xbox owner, I would never judge anyone, but don’t ask me for a ride to the airport if you have a PlayStation. There are a lot of upsides to living here. The town offers easy access to the Interstate to get into the city quickly but has enough amenities that you never need to leave if you don’t want to, which obviously I don’t. I consider it a personal tragedy when anything requires me to leave the house. Property values are reasonable, the grocery store is close, and the school system is small enough that my girls don’t have to compete against a thousand other kids for a spot on a team, even if my oldest will graduate with more people in her class than I had in my entire high school. All told, there’s not much to complain about. That’s never stopped a single person in cyberspace.

Being here by circumstance rather than volition, the locals air out their grievances daily on Facebook, the perfect platform for sharing all those thoughts that should have been kept bottled up inside. Our suburb has several chatter groups where residents can sound off about whatever’s bothering them, which is basically everything. Traffic. Crime. A lack of growth. Too much growth. Kids. Inflation. Chickens. The philosophical struggle to find meaning in a harsh and uncaring world. Pants. There’s no issue too big or small to escape the online ire of some weird guy I’ve never met who lives down the street. I take these impersonal attacks very personally. If you hate where I choose to live, you must hate me. Honestly, that’s the right call, but for the wrong reasons. Life around here is actually pretty great.

Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

There’s a bit of selection bias at play. If you’re generally content with your life and location, you likely don’t jump on the internet all the time to sound off about it. It’s mainly the angry and maladjusted who demand to be heard. My kids are ten times louder when they’re unhappy about something, which is almost always. They still whine less than the average commenter on the various chatter pages. One of the most common complaints by locals is that there’s “no place to eat,” which is about as legitimate as when my kids say there’s nothing to eat even though we have a full fridge and pantry. When a new restaurant does open here, people lament that it’s not the one they wanted. Nobody goes to it, so the new place often closes within a few months. That’s when people on the chatter pages complain that the town can’t support new restaurants. I don’t know what they want. According to them, fine dining is too expensive, fast food is too low quality, and anything in between is both overpriced and underwhelming. Their standards are impossible to satisfy. It’s a shame because we live in a time and place of plenty. This is the Midwest. You can grab a pizza at Casey’s that’s better than any food ever eaten by the richest king a thousand years ago. Not counting gas stations, we have six different pizza restaurants in our suburb alone. If that’s not enough, people could make a short trip down the interstate to Indy where they could choose from a hundred more. Or they could log onto Facebook and complain about it. Guess which option everybody chooses. What a privilege to live in a time of such opulence and be so miserable.

We have a chain restaurant in our town that I’ll call Sandwich Sam’s. Actually, we have two of them. One day, someone broke ground on a new restaurant across the street from one of the Sandwich Sam’s locations. People in the chatter groups excitedly speculated about what it would be. It turned out Sandwich Sam’s was just moving into the new building across the street. It was cheaper than remodeling. People were furious. Now, any time anyone builds anything in town the top comment on Facebook is always, “Is it another Sandwich Sam’s?” The dig is so pervasive that the mayor started responding to it. That’s right: Our highest local elected official is on our town’s unofficial Facebook pages defending the honor of chain restaurants. It’s democracy as exactly as envisioned by the ancient Greeks. People back then complained that everything was getting worse, too. Plato himself used to grumble about “kids today.” As a species, whining is in our blood.

My fellow suburbanites don’t just get mad about restaurants. There’s also everything else. They’re simultaneously upset that things are changing and staying the same. They yearn for an earlier time when life was perfect, which usually coincided with their childhood when they didn’t have any responsibilities and their parents covered all their bills. The locals on Facebook hate the increased traffic, but when the town installed its first roundabout to deal with it, there was practically a riot. It’s the reason they threw the last mayor out of office. How dare he put a round intersection in our square town? That’s how you know I don’t live in Carmel, which is the roundabout capital of the world. Honestly, they went too far. Standard circles are fine, but Carmel has two-lane, peanut shaped roundabouts that defy the lies of God and man. The correct way to navigate that particular kind of intersection is to slam on the gas and pray. Then again, Carmel has twenty-five pizza places. They must be doing something right.

Another common complaint on the chatter pages is that there aren’t enough jobs here. Yet, whenever someone builds a new business that will create jobs, people moan that there’s no more pasture for cows. The average commenter on the Facebook pages thinks the point of agriculture is to give people something to look at as they drive by at sixty-five miles per hour. The actual speed limit on country roads is fifty-five, but if you drive that slow the cops will pull you over for being a communist. Every property owner here is a petty tyrant. They don’t want anyone to tell them what to do with their own land, but they want to tell everyone else what to do with theirs. How dare you turn the land you paid for and legally own into a warehouse or a subdivision? I enjoyed looking at that vacant lot full of trash. It was scenic scrub brush.

I lost all sympathy for people who complain about new construction when I worked at a newspaper in a nearby city. I was supposed to be the night cops reporter, but in practice I mostly covered public meetings where people were angry about anyone building anything anywhere. Their main objection was always that it would kill their children. That made some sense when the project in question was a landfill, but they said the same thing about a quarry, a hog farm, a fire station, and, finally, a hospital. Seriously, a mother walked up to the microphone and lamented that an ambulance might run over her child. That was the day I realized I couldn’t be a journalist any more. After listening to the public complain about each of those projects for months, all of them were built. None of them killed any children. Then again, it’s only been fifteen years. It’s possible year sixteen is when all the deaths happen. I’ll never know either way because nearly every reporter in the world has been laid off since then. Getting out of that industry when I did was one of the few wise decisions I’ve ever made. Thank goodness I’m a quitter.

In a way, I don’t have a right to complain about the complainers where I live now. I’m still an outsider. Residing here for a mere decade and a half isn’t enough to make me a local in the eyes of actual locals. The fact that all four of my kids were born here doesn’t change anything. They’re outsiders, too. Your family has to be within municipal limits for at least three generations before you start to fit in. You also need grudges that stretch back at least that long. When someone mouths off in the chatter group, you have to be able to clap back about something stupid that person’s dad did in 1967. We all remember that hat, Larry. Facebook itself should make that easier. Thank goodness we’re all creating a permanent record of our every casual thought on a publicly viewable platform searchable by everyone in the world. When my grandkids grow up here, they’ll know exactly which of their friends’ grandparents insulted Sandwich Sam’s in the Year of Our Lord 2024. Future generations have so much to look forward to.

I hope my kids stick around long enough for that to happen. I’ll do what I can to keep them here. There are enough colleges within driving distance that they could live at home and commute while pursuing higher education. That would save us from paying for room and board, which would be good since our current budget for that is zero. I can put them up in our house basically for free. They don’t eat much, and everything we own is already broken. It’s all sunk costs now. I want them to go to college locally so they’re more likely to get a job around here. My biggest fear is that the girls will go to college across the country and meet some boy there. There’s no quicker way to ruin your life. Just as my wife. If they fall in love far away, they’re likely to live far away, which would cause them to miss out on the wonderful existence our suburb has to offer. Right now, we live within an hour drive of both sets of grandparents, which isn’t something I got to experience growing up. Hopefully my kids can ignore all the trolls on Facebook who hate this place. Then again, my kids will never see those comments because Facebook is only for old people. We won’t be in trouble until the trolls move to TikTok.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James