Eternity Ahead

Rural America is abandoned.

Abandoned farms, abandoned houses, abandoned mom 'n pop stores. Drive through south central Pennsylvania, or West Virginia, yourself and you'll see what I mean. Beautiful rolling hills of farms dotted with falling down barns and empty houses. Shuttered grocery stores. Where are all the people, we wonder; and what do the ones who remain here, in the small towns and teetering buildings, do? It gives one a kind of Planet of the Apes sensation . . .

Yet there are two institutions much in evidence: Wal-Mart, and christianity.

The number of homemade religious bill boards, and sets of three crosses upon the hills, is striking; but perhaps no less so than the number of Wal-Marts huddled at the bottom of every other range. Since there are no other grocery stores in evidence for many miles, we venture into one to pick up some water and other items. Subjective reporting supports what hard evidence has already shown: the percentage of obese people in america is staggering; and the amount of cheap, bad food those of us with little money are able to buy in these ubiquitous Wal-Marts is equally so. It's difficult not to make the connection--and one wonders why all the other shoppers, with carts full of sucrose-enhanced food, don't? This is not so much the snob factor as the basic-common-sense-for-your-health factor, a switch that american food policy and advertising seem to have successfully turned off in the majority of our (remaining) rural population.

Why not then, depressed and under constant economic pressure to abandon these beautiful places and ancestral homes, hand it over to a high power. This hand-painted billboard, repeated twice across county lines, was our favorite:

"Eternity Ahead. You must accept Jesus as your PERSONAL savior."

Emptiness ahead. It all feels very sad; as if the dreams of the founding fathers and the pioneers who struggled and risked and lost their lives to get here warranted so much more, so much more, than this. It would be easy to be cynical, to say we expected no more than this; that what we are touching on is only the surface of thsee places, an easy stereotype. Probably at least part of this is true. Yet it is almost impossible to shake the feeling that we could all, somehow, do better.