every time i go home i realize that this place couldn't be a "home" to any one. more and more trees are cut down every time i return, each time naively hopeful that the world hass come to its senses and the destruction will stop. but they keep cutting down trees and bulldozing strawberry farms to put up a Sobey's and a Dollar Store. my so-called community is built on driving everywhere and living nowhere. there are so few places where people can actually connect, because they've been replaced with places where people can shop. and when i go back there i can feel myself slipping, i can feel myself becoming someone that i don't want to be. all the energy drains out of me, and i do what i'm told...or rebel over things that really don't matter, just to feel something other than this frustration and immobilization that envelops me every time i am back among streets with names like Commerce Valley. it feels like everyone is sleepwalking, putting all the energy they have into just surviving the everyday until they have nothing left and it becomes too much effort to smile at your neighbour or care about where your garbage goes.
and every time my foot hits the concrete that used to be soft wild grass, this song plays in my head:
White people are so scared of black people.
They bulldoze out to the country, and put up houses on little loop-d-loop streets.
And while America gets its heart cut right out of its chest
The Berlin wall still runs down main street separating east side from west.
And nothing is stirring, not even a mouse, in the boarded up stores and the broken down houses
So they hang colorful banners off all the street lamps
Just to prove they got no manners, no mercy, and no sense.
And I wonder then what it will take for my city to rise.
First we admit our mistakes and then we open our eyes.
The ghost of old buildings are haunting parking lots in the city of good neighbors that history forgot.
I remember the first time I saw someone lying on the cold street
I thought, "I can't just walk past you, this can't just be true."
But I learned by example to just keep moving my feet.
It's amazing the things that we all learn to do.
So we're led by denial like lambs to the slaughter
Serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water and the old farmroad's a four-lane
That leads to the mall and my dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall
And I wonder then what it will take for my country to rise.
First we admit our mistakes and then we open our eyes.
'til nation's last taker succumbs to one last dumb decision
And America the beautiful is just one big subdivision.
-Ani Difranco
