It is impossible to know what a place was like without ever living through its past. One could say that is a blessing in disguise, but I am not so sure. Although northern Minnesota is nowhere near the rust belt, it certainly has some of its qualities. When my mother and I drive and visit family the state of the place always pulls my eyes past the shielded windows of the car. Strewn about among the seemingly endless miles of trees are abandoned schoolhouses, factories, and shops which haven’t felt the sensation of human breath since before I was born. For me, this place has always been this way.

For my mother though, everything was a much different experience. She never felt the booming industry that towns further east in Pennsylvania or Ohio once had, but that sense of family was still there. It was a place that had by all accounts barely changed since the beginning of the 1900s. Everyone knew everybody and somehow if they didn’t they knew one of their relatives. This probably felt suffocating to many, but has the alternative been much better?

Instead of the family-run gas station or restaurant that characterized small-town America, a new, dare I say soulless blob of corporate influence has replaced it. Oftentimes, there is little variation left except for picking KFC or McDonald’s to have for lunch if you don’t want to drive forty minutes to somewhere bigger. You may take this as hyperbole, but in these places, there is very little sight of light at the end of the tunnel. This situation of corporate takeover also brings the degradation of past self-reliance. Those who would have had their own small business thirty years ago are now the ones who either left town, work on oil fields a few states away or stock Walmart aisles for a paltry fifteen dollars an hour. As one would expect, drug abuse runs rampant, further eliminating any prior notions of a stable community.

Suburbia has its own poisonous aura, they are just harder to detect at first. Here it is not the feeling of a decaying town on its last gasps before death, but the complete lack of originality since its creation. Nothing describes this better than the average neighborhood house being built today. We’ve undoubtedly all seen some version of the example I am talking about. The newly constructed neighborhood in some third ring suburb where all the houses have the same cheap plywood structure, with the only difference being a seemingly random arrangement of windows and a hit or miss chance of the place having a deck or not.

These places are not made to stand the test of time. They are instead meant as a transitory space, only supposed to survive the time of an average mortgage. Like a lifecycle in nature, these old buildings will be torn down and rebuilt again for a new young family. Consequently, everything else is also unable to be grounded in originality as well. And why would there be any desire for it? The ease of a cookie-cutter house and mass-produced *insert any random retail category here* is fine because we are moving out in a few years anyway right? These places are not built for building community, but to make consumption as easy as possible.

I still roll my eyes at phrases such as “Our society is fake and bland.” (usually because the people that say such things are less likable than a hornets’ nest and say it from a place of resentment), but the older I get the more it feels as though it strikes at the heart of something important. Like suburbia, a sense of originality is missing in almost any place you look. What is watched, sung, or listened to in my generation that isn’t helped by some billion-dollar company that bases everything on what research told them people will like? I can think of a few, and anyone can, but they never rise to the level of mainstream relevance.

You can also see this emptiness in how people look to describe themselves. Identity itself has been commodified and packaged into a product to be bought and sold. One of the most egregious examples of this is loot crate culture (if you can even call it such a thing). This is a realm where anything from masculinity to someone’s fondness of frog hentai is condensed down to a monthly subscription box with cheap plastic items to put on your wall as a showing of how important they are in describing yourself. Forget actually doing any work to create something, throwing a few spare bucks will get you that feeling while cutting that hard stuff out. These shallow subcultures are nothing but the infantilization of self-expression. They do not symbolize a country that is doing well or is headed in the right direction, but one that is lost entirely.

One may shout from the rooftops that these ideas of freedom and liberty so often associated with this country are something that still makes us special. But then I ask you, what exactly does that even mean anymore? Are we not spied on at every turn by our own government? What liberty do we have but Mexico does not besides guns? This act as though we are still in the 1800s completely ignores the reality that we see before our very eyes. I can also tell you now, that you will have much more liberty to do whatever you please south of the Rio Grande with less of the NSA spying. And while the standard of living may be higher here, toys can satiate the need for belonging for only so long.

To those in Europe, it seems rather peculiar that an American so far removed from their ancestor’s former country will try to identify with it, but they do not truly understand the alternative. In this place, identity is not like how you find it in your homeland. Our national character is neither based on ethnic nor religious ties, but a vague foundational idea. What it means to be American is exactly what you as the individual want it to be. This is our eternal weakness as a nation. For if something has the ability to mean everything, then it means nothing at all. This tied in with a complete disregard for the creation of community or tradition results in a situation leading to complete disaster.

For many of us, heritage is at least something that is real and unchangeable by companies or marketers. What your ancestry is, is just that. A foundation that is unable to be swayed by what you buy or wear. Even better, you are not just a fascinated onlooker like a viewer of a TV show, but an actual part of its story if you choose to be.

I can’t shake the feeling that for many of us, identifying with this ancestral homeland and culture is a coping mechanism from living in modern America. But is that really all that bad? Perhaps. Or it may also be the realization that our families should have never lost a connection to something so special in the first place. The answer, like most things, is probably somewhere in the middle.