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maybe this is how it's supposed to be, how it is supposed to look. maybe this is how we are supposed to feel, watching from car windows, walking on asphalt. maybe these are the best houses, the best stores, and the best people to call our neighbors. maybe this is the utmost lifestyle a person can hope for. maybe this is what we have always wanted, and maybe, with every move, we ask for more. suburbia is america's new kinship. born out of the desire for home ownership and serenity apart from cities, the suburban lifestyle has fostered parts of our culture we can easily call common - automobiles, housing subdivisions, and shopping centers, as well as the infrastructure of roads, parking lots, and power stations that support it all. these are the new towns, the cancer of our landscape, built and maintained by capitalism, fed upon by those with a hunger for convenience at any cost. convenience has cost us our communities, corporations, absentee landlords, sell us our socks, motor oil, and cereal under one roof. developers, our homebuilders, sell us one of three available floor plans. a large portion of american society has willingly homogenized by making a choice in situations where there is no real choice. by buying what is cheaper, what is immediately easier, we continue to break apart any traditions which might make life a little more worth living. we give that up by moving to "pleasant forest" and "fox glen," where the streets are named after the trees and animals the bulldozers forced out to build houses. sprawl hollows our cities out from the core. we view our future from the monotony of the beltway loop now, aesthetically suffocated and socially inhibited by our solitary commute from place to place. and a solution? this situation, one that has been impressed upon all generations since world war II, is increasingly complex. it's about more than cookie-cutter construction. it's about more than tearing down the shopping mall. its about our choices as people with, at the moment, the prospect of an alternative to the conventions of suburbia. just as the corporate environment thrives, it also falls short of many expectations. we are not a complete nation of consumers, of idle victims. we do not have to live where our parents lived. we do not have to aspire to the level where much of middle-to-upper-class america has found a place to rest contentedly. make choices that support communities, that support people. suburbia, in some form, is undoubtedly here to stay. the american dream will hold on and manifest itself in that volatile zone between city and country. the status quo can be maintained, or it can be broken and re-routed toward something more positive, something more conducive to living and working like people rather than machines.


http://www.shacamerica.net
http://www.directaction.info
http://www.earthliberationfront.com
http://www.palestinechronicle.com
http://www.infoshop.org