Monday, March 2, 2009

No City Bashing

A recent abduction of a girl in a small town in alberta set people there off making comments that they were shocked and horrified that such terrible thing could happen in their peaceful, harmless little small town. Usually when something nasty happens in a small town, the city bashers come forward with their slanders about "big city problems" coming to the small town. One woman from Penhold, Alberta, opined that she had moved to this small community to "escape the Big City problems" and her "sleeping little rural community (had) lost some of it's innocence." I think these people must be walking around in some kind of protective, blind, deaf bubble. I am 61 years old and grew up in a small town (10,000 pop) in the interior of British Columbia. I was eleven years old when I and two of my girl friends first experienced an angry, lashing out assault by a young man...we managed to fight him off...was he from the city? No...no way, country boy, farm boy, hopped up on repressed anger probably from father-beatings. My point, small, rural communities are just as capable of inventing their own "sweep it under the rug" nastiness, manifesting itself as assault, murder, abduction. When I was sixteen, still living in the small towns, the shocking radio announcement came about a murder in an even smaller town north of us. The Ring twin sisters, both fifteen years old, had been murdered on their way home from school in the little community of Mara Lake in the north okanagan; the man convicted of their murder had been born, raised and schooled in the same "sleepy little rural community" as I came from. He didn't have to go visit "the city" to learn how to be a psychopath. Perhaps there is something about the isolation of rural communities that can be a special breeding ground for this kind of thing. Just think of some of the more recent murder atrocities and the location of their engenderment: Mayerthorpe, Alberta, the murderer of four Mounties was a small town, born and bred farm boy. Oh, how could he possibly have thought to do such a thing when he was just a small town fellah? Did some secret murder agents from The City come in the dark of night and instruct him in his nefarious deed. Columbine School massacre in Columbine, Colorado, population on 24 thousand...I could go on, my point is, after having lived for half my life in "sleepy little rural communities" and having been only too glad to get as far away from them when i was finally old enough to leave home, it does not surprise me IN THE LEAST that nasty things happen in small towns...for people carry around their twisted secrets in small communities as much as in "big" communities like cities. there is nothing inherent in urbanity that engenders crime and depraved behaviour; matter of fact, my experience has been that small towns and communities are just as capable of producing weirdos and criminals....after all, it was in the "sleepy little rural community" that I learned to "look behind me" when I went out...just street (or rural road) smarts, is all. Stop it with the slanders against the city. Open your eyes rural and small town newbies...moving to the country you will find that a perv born and bred in the country could just as likely be living down the street from you.

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