The Hare Scrambles and Avenue Q

Fayetteville is a conservative town.  The word conservative in this context is a dichotomy.  Fayetteville is a community which sees fit to ban bicycles from its historical district downtown.  Fayetteville is a community which sees fit to tear down a skateboard tree because evidently it is in violation of the sign ordinance.  Fayetteville is a community which sees fit not to enforce citywide speed limits, especially in areas of high pedestrian traffic such as Hamount Hill.  Fayetteville is a community which has spent millions of dollars on downtown renovation yet cannot seem to find revenue to fund Parks and Recreation.  There is no public skateboard park.  There only is one public pool, and it is beside Fayetteville State University.  Not all residents of Fayetteville would feel comfortable frequenting this facilty.  Fayetteville is a community which built a Botanical Garden, yet the people that patron it are the same people who belong to Highland County Club.  Fayetteville is a community that sponsors a symphony orchestra, yet there is no jazz.  There is Harley Davidson.  There is drug activity.  There are murders.  Fayetteville is a dichotomy, an enigma which defies the traditional definition of a small southern town.  Lumberton, at least in film, may be more accurate in depicting a small southern North Carolina town, yet it still hosts Frank Booth.  What is it about small southern North Carolina towns?  I lived in Columbus, Ohio for a period spanning a decade, and I found it after several years of aclimation to be more intelligent and more down to earth.  People  told me that Columbus is so land locked with no geographical diversity, that its citizens were more savvy in being discerning conosseurs of products.  Also they were more discerning in life in general.  There is little small talk.  People in Cowtown were on the bottom, and everything that amassed above it was worthy of its own existence.  Columbus was its own filter, and it was a good one.  The history of the American south stems from slavery.  Therefore owning and managing slaves was a large part of southern culture.  So was sitting on large covered front porches drinking ice tea, lemonade, and mint julips.  That is what film would tell you about the south.  It is a pleasing visual and romantic sentiment.  In essence there was a dichotomy between the elite white slave owners and their poor uneducated Negro slaves.  Is this dichotomy the same dichotomy that exists in Fayetteville today?  Possibly.  I have yet to figure it out.  Each day I witness the diversity of Fayetteville, and still I do not understand it.  Maybe it is because I refuse to allow this traditional sentiment of the American South to exist in my own mind.  We have developed past that as a country, right?  Then again there was a Civil War, and I am discovering just now that America really has not evolved at all.  We are just the same as we always have been.  I guess that means I have to forgo my paid-for home and find another place to live that better represents my own life sentiments.  Over time I have come to understand what they are.  It would seem I am a bit European in nature.  All of those years working on cruise ships certainly has given me a more wordly perspective.  That is not all of it.  The other aspect of enlightenment is study. One has to want to learn other ways of life to escape their own indigenous roots.  I knew the day I graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill I was ready for something else.  I knew because while I understood elitist southern culture, I wanted more.  I tried Columbia, South Carolina first, and it was not because I knew this then.  I went to USC, because they offered me a Graduate Teaching Associateship.  They essentially paid for my masters degree.  I enjoyed this period of my life immensely, until it ended.  That was not pretty.  In retrospect this period of life typified southern culture.  I was a music star for all intents and purposes.  It was a creative, artistic, happy time for me, and I became spoiled to think that this is how real life always would be.  NOT.  Even living in Fayetteville today it is a temptation to fall back into this lifestyle.  I perfectly am capable of self-actualization.  Given silence, a blank canvas, or an empty house I will find ways to create music, visual art, or build furniture.  I have an education to thank for this.  I crave the serenity to do such things, but that is not how the world is.  One must fight for one's existence.  While I can be perfectly happy in a creative vacuum, eventually reality will dawn and you will have to lay down your paint brushes and pick up a musket.  Today I live this way.  I toggle back and forth between limited creativity, and what I believe is an encroaching reality.  We are not a conservative society in dealing with the environment.  Conservation in America, like scientific inquisition, is a thing of the past.  We wage publicity campaigns of the wealthy mediocre, and fail in all capacities of sustaining the planet.  One day truly we will be fighting in the ruins of the military industrial complex.