Last year, about a mile from our place, as the crow flies, two fast-food joints and a convenience store popped up. They replaced a family farm that was still operating when we moved in a couple of decades back, where an elderly man in overalls sold us plants from a decaying greenhouse. And across the road there’s now a new supermarket, on some prime bottomland that my farmer cousins would covet.
If you were to complain to local officials about this sort of commercial encroachment on the rural landscape, you’d hear that yes, the added traffic congestion is unfortunate, but think about the tax dollars that will now come to our schools, and, after all, this is what people want and apparently need — because those businesses wouldn’t have picked our neighborhood if market studies hadn’t revealed some unmet consumer demand.
It’s the implied shrug-off heard not just in our town, but everywhere – and you’ve heard it, of course: “You can’t stop progress.”
Real progress at this point of American life wouldn’t be more sprawl, since that’s become a trite tale over the past 80 years. It’s not surprising to learn that over a 15-year period, New York state lost a quarter of a million acres of farmland to development, according to the American Farmland Trust — which, AFT’s research suggests, would have yielded $288 million in annual farm output, and would have sustained 7,200 jobs.1 And while those statistics are rather interesting, they represent what a journalist would call a dog-bites-man story, meaning it’s so typical, this story of sprawl, as to be not very newsworthy.
Progress worth reporting — of the more interesting man-bites-dog variety — would be if we found a mass movement by Americans to reclaim land for uses more productive than holding the foundations of buildings. It would a good story if we discovered that our consumer tastes and aesthetic sensibilities were moving away from the homogeneity of all those commercial boxes that line our roadways, and perhaps toward the lively eccentricities of earlier times. It would be newsworthy if we found powerful consumer demand for authentic and bespoke products, especially in what we eat, rather than market-tested, minimally offensive fast food on demand.
Imagine what our society might be like if we weren’t so averse to surprise and so eager for conformity — that is, if we weren’t afraid of what we don’t really know.
This notion of conformity as the norm conflicts with our self-image, because we’ve always been told that America is a nation of individualists. But it’s not true.
If we weren’t so comforted by conformity and alienated by idiosyncrasy, there wouldn’t be 35,000 Starbucks stores, and counting, and we would be eating less food from packages and more from the earth. We wouldn’t be eager to move into suburban neighborhoods outside Cleveland that look just like the neighborhoods around Baltimore — into homes of similar design that are furnished, in both places, with faux Americana décor from HomeGoods.
In fact, Americans have never celebrated our differences as much as we have seemed to fear them, no matter what the myths of our history suggest. For many, the so-called melting pot of America has cooled into a congealed dish, and there’s no reason to introduce anything else into the pot.
That’s clear from the pushback arising in one state after another to the unequal burden that American society has placed on people of color, LGBTQ people and immigrants. Here’s one example: State legislators across the country are so afraid of gender dysphoria — which is a medical reality that they apparently don’t understand — that they’ve passed bans on gender-affirming care that now cover more than one-third of the roughly 300,000 transgender high-school-aged youth in the U.S. 5 What possible benefit could come from politicians interposing their judgment about what is appropriate medical treatment between that of a doctor and a patient (or, in the case of minors, a patient’s parents)? What provokes such decisions, other than a lack of appreciation for the whole range of human experience?
Now, I know there’s not a straight line between the politicization of medical care for transgender youth and the yielding of farmland to a commercial strip. But both suggest a discomfort with what we don’t fully know, and a tragic lack curiosity and wonder at the range of the whole world around us. Rather than embracing or eagerly seeking out what’s challenging and unique — in individuals, and in the built world that is our home — we’ve grown comfortable with a life that reflects what we’ve known before, and a community that looks like Anywhere Else.
So we settle for a bland reality. These days, as my car crawls in traffic along that nearby commercial strip, I’m remembering the old man in overalls who sold us plants, and the silo and barn that used to flank the road. And I’m wishing for anything that would reflect the full diversity of our society, and that might celebrate the many ways it may be presented.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.