A Tradition of Reality Distortion

Peel away the snakeskin of normalcy and comfort paid tribute by welcome sign declarations of “Keeping Tradition a Part of Our Future” and the truth of that tradition stands revealed: as sections of this town and this countryside fall to addiction, suicide, and poverty, the only tradition being kept a part of anything is one of a deep-rooted obliviousness to the devastation of reality, a tradition designed to preserve, at any cost, the semi-translucent  Band-Aid of brochure-ready, warm-hearted, they-tried, synecdochic mediocrity that masks the infection eating this town and countless others like it alive. 

This rot is not simply an opioid crisis or a drug crisis or an iequality crisis but a multi-generational crisis of secular excommunication, willful obliviousness, and the inability to listen on the part of those addicted to disbelief and the distortion of reality in the name of a nostalgia for a time that never existed; “Back in my day” is a persistent temptress, a potent excuse. 

None of this is written with the intention of transferring blame from one side to the other: each side shoulders its own burden of complicity and is responsible for the consequences of the individual and collective paths they choose to take; no one is blameless. This does not, however, dilute the fact that obliviousness, inaction, and the promulgation of patronizing bromides and can-kicking half-measures are just as addictive and deadly in the long-term as meth and fentanyl and heroin are in the short and will – should this tradition of hearing loss and reality distortion in the name of a false idyll continue to supplant the capacity even to admit that this cataclysm exists, here, now, in this bastion of wanton heartlandia – ensure that the next words on any future welcome sign are an epitaph.

(TW)