Just Me

Okay, so I think I've illustrated my position on absolute good and evil (recap: don't exist), and at least outlined how I feel about politics (there's too much of it, and almost everyone involved in it is a jerk). So, who else can I piss off?
Well, let's talk about my feelings about my home town! Yay, that will make them ALL love me!
Okay, I was born and raised here, not just in the US in general, but in a very small town very far from anywhere important. I recommend this as a pretty good way to completely miss out on the defining moments for your generation (or anyone else's, unless they were born before the advent of the internal-combustion-driven manure spreader). Now, you might think that this would make me a knee-jerk reactionary, the way it seems to have done for most of the rest of the rural population. But you would only think that because you are unfamiliar with the place where I grew up.
Where I'm from (and names don't matter, so we won't use them!), money is a much talked-about but little-experienced phenomenon. To illustrate, let me just say that the budget for our town for an entire year is probably less than most really successful people's annual salary. Let that sink in for a moment: in most parts of the country, "making it" means earning more money as one single person that all of us in my home town together can come up with in a year. You might say, "well, sure, it doesn't take that much money to run a town of... what, two, three hundred?" For your information, there are around seven thousand of us, and the average (median) income is around $22K a year. Of course, the average family size is around four children, which further deflates the value of $22K a year. I mean, if you're single, then that is definitely enough to keep you in a reasonable amount of beer and skittles for a year, but if you're married with four or five kids (and I have more than that!!!) it's a struggle just to feel like working is worth the effort. If you're really, really frugal, and have the same view of 'necessities' that your average homeless person has, then earning $22K a year is at least as noble as running in place. You don't get ahead, but you don't fall behind either. Of course, if you value cleanliness over frugality, or if your children want to be clothed in something manufactured AFTER 1975, then even economically running in place is kinda out of reach.
This has made the natives of my fair birthplace rather uniformly bitter and sullen. When we can afford a TV set, it only goes and shows us more stuff we CAN'T afford. When we can afford the very modest price of some flat, vaguely bitter on-tap beer down at the bar, we have only those in the same situation to commiserate with, and none of us have the energy to entertain anyone else's problems. Of course, if there were any more entertaining or enlightening venues in which to spend our time, I'm sure we would be as a whole uplifted, but there is no theater, all the restaurants are either bars with food tacked on or McDonalds, and the drive-in only runs for six weeks in the summer. That's probably why our major form of entertainment is fistfights.
Now, add to this unhappy situation the fact that, despite our being the poorest-per-capita in our county and tri-state region, we have the best paid police force in either of those indexes (starting salary: $40k a year), and the further fact that those cops feel that they are being paid to bust heads and in general run our town like Noriega ran Mexico. The result is that even church-going, kitten-loving old ladies spit at the cops every day, and most kids look at law enforcement the way people during the Cold War regarded Russian military leaders. In short, we hate them with a burning, squinty-eyed hate.
I know this probably sounds like the rant of every young person who grew up in a small town and wants to see something bigger and better, but let me hasten to qualify. I am no longer as young as I was (at 37, I'm more than likely already halfway through or better), I've seen both bigger and better, and rather than just gripe, I've honestly tried to improve things. I've "gotten involved," I've volunteered, I've been on committees and distributed flyers and pushed petitions, and it all just finally convinced me: the world in general is made of crap, and each unique location is just one more example of crap in a new arrangement.
Example: where I live, you can get arrested because you accidentally wore your T-shirt inside out: you get accused of public intoxication (you must be drunk, you didn't even put your shirt on right!) and resisting arrest (you insisted you weren't drunk and didn't want to get arrested just to prove that you weren't), but when it goes to the hearing they plead it down to disorderly conduct with a $150 fine WHEN ALL YOU DID WAS ACCIDENTALLY WEAR YOUR SHIRT INSIDE OUT.
But nothing can be that bad, right? I must just be pissing, moaning & groaning because that's my general nature, right? I mean, if I was really serious, I would print the name of our fair little town, so others could come visit and judge for themselves, right?
Are you kidding? I'd get sued twenty ways to Sunday by everyone who came, saw, and realized that I hadn't even scratched the surface.