Suburban Blight on Policy Street

If you are ever curious to know what we are really up against in America, then I invite you all to take a drive down South Policy Street in Salem N.H.
Therein is an edifying spectacle indeed, endless vistas of McMansions set up on little tree-less artificial hills....nouveau rich bunkers with two story columns...a Ford Explorer (or two) in every driv way.
And across the street, a trailer park as dingy and hopeless as ever plus the occasional outright shanty with a rusting Toyota Camry up on blocks in the front yard.
The only thing that interrupts this repetitive landscape is the regularly spaced mini-malls with the inevitable Tru-Value hardware stores, christmas shops, and gas stations selling to all comers for outrageous prices.
It is picture perfect portrait of widening income disparities and the corrosive effects of galloping sprawl.
Once, seventeen years ago, when I went to College in Manchester, southern New Hampshire was a genial wasteland with it's yearly hunting fatalities and local bus service that shut down at 6:30pm on weekdays.
What happened?
People in Boston started making mad phat cash in the High Tech Industry (and elsewhere) eventually a lot of money started chasing a finite supply of choice housing so homebuyers were forced further and further afield for the shit hole of their dreams.
Now however southern N.H. is running wide open with Bay State interlopers mortgaging themselves to the hilt to own a two-garage heap that was practically glued together by the builders.
As Boston declines into a cultural colony of New York City, so too does the Granite State become a commuter colony of Boston.
Everybody, rich and poor commute endlessly to work, their purchasing power is wasted in chain stores that send money far out of the region, and we actually wonder why the future is uniformly debt ridden and bleak.
Frankly I liked Massachusetts better when it was a proper wasteland back itself in 1975...nobody lived here....nobody thought they could make money here, our chief export was a quality education.
Once you had your diploma, you left.
There used to be empty lots around Harvard Square, if you bought a book there was a ninety percent chance your money went into the pocket of a fellow citizen of the Commonwealth....
Now?
Everyone in Massachusetts thinks they are a millionaire because they house they are living in, no matter how much they owe the bank, is worth $900,000.00
So it's just natural that with such tendencies in the electorate people would elect a millionaire to rule over them.
Oh how it all flies out of town though. Grocery money, movie tickets, mortgages everything....and Salem N.H. looks about as spiritually desiccated as Burlington or Belchertown Massachusetts.
Localism is disappearing, without the green and white highway signs we wouldn't know what community we were in thanks to 7-11, Starbucks, etc etc etc.
I don't know what is to be done....our economy is alleged to be mighty....but sometimes it's results are paltry and cheap.
And I hope as Dennis Kucinich, John Kerry or Howard Dean go rolling down those back rounds they look around and see what is becoming of the country they hope to lead.