What is the fabric of the modern American community? Well, a big part of it consists of an endless parade of chain drugstores selling the kind of stuff chain drugstores sell (including booze!).
That’s the landscape that Chris Weagel shows us from his hometown of St. Clair Shores, Mich. It is also a landscape that can be found in every state in America. Like it or not, this is the way much of our country looks.
Our friends at Rustwire.com posted Weagel’s very funny and very depressing tour of the various Rite-Aids, Walgreen’s, and CVSs (CVSes? CVSi?) that line the main drag of St. Clair Shores, a city of 63,000 that is part of Metro Detroit.
Here’s what he told Rustwire about the video:
I’m 29 and have lived in Metro Detroit my whole life. I’ve about had it with the place and am saving money to flee.
The Older Generations still in control have no idea how incensed and disgusted the young people are at them for destroying Detroit and telling us to be thankful.
Weagal’s comments recall an earlier post from Rustwire that we featured last month, in which a businessman lamented the way that unattractive sprawl development in the Detroit suburbs makes it nearly impossible to recruit qualified professionals.
I want to make it perfectly clear, this is not just about Detroit and environs. As many commenters pointed out on that previous post, this kind of crappy sprawl development is practically ubiquitous. And there is a lot of exciting urban innovation happening inside Detroit itself.
But what strikes me about Weagel’s video is how numbingly familiar it all looks — and how we usually don’t even take the time to step back and look at the absurdity of this pattern of development. How we don’t usually take the time to ask ourselves, is this what we really want?
And if it isn’t what we really want, why is this what we have ended up with?
