[marktwain]

“I hate to admit it, but she’s right about one thing: “small towns are places that smart people escape from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival”. That’s been my experience.”

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I think it is closer to: single people leave small towns to find mates, then they flee urban blight to raise families in suburbia or small towns where life is much better. You can get all the intellect you need over the net now.

[B-Chan]

Didn't work that way for me. Although I was born and raised in Dallas, I went to junior high and high school in a small East Texas city, and you can best believe I got the hell out as quickly as I could. Everyone with any kind of dream or desire to live in the real world did. That town was a stultifying, uncultured, mind-numbing hive of small-minded, materialistic peckerwoods with no ambition beyond getting a lifetime job on the line at the pipe plant or at the "tar facktry". Brrrrr.

And suburbia? A totally artificial environment, where isolation from humanity is the goal, a theme park for autostic living built on the scale of cars instead of people? Nein danke.

Give me the city. The city — civitas — is the foundation of civilization. It is where art, commerce, and the exchange of ideas happens. Those who enjoy life among the bugs, reptiles, beady-eyed hillbillies, and bored, tweaked-out, alienated teenagers that populate farm and fringe are of course welcome to their own ways of life — but it's not for me.