Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [7]
We have ten-foot-tall sunflowers, accessible quiet places, and gentle people. Long-term Nebraskan residents tend to be large, rather plain white people whom my husband swears he can recognize in any airport in America. Nebraskans are the kind of people who compete to ride in the backseat, who put money in Salvation Army buckets, and who bake casseroles for grieving neighbors. We are humble people, proud of our football team, our Sandhills, our Native American heritage, and our few celebrities—Warren Buffett, Henry Fonda, Johnny Carson, and Tom Osborne. We don't expect to be invited any place glamorous and we don't make demands. We are happy just to be included.
Most of us come from farm families whose grandparents barely survived the Great Depression. We like our state, but worry that we won't be able to keep our children here. Wal-Marts and Pizza Huts are moving in. Family farms and city cafes are dying.
Lincoln is our capital city. Its skyline is dominated by our capitol building with its golden dome crowned by The Sower scattering seed across the land. The year I wrote this book, the capitol was being repaired and refurbished for the new century, a nice metaphor for the changes in our state. The men who worked on the capitol scaffolding spoke thirty different languages, which prompted my friend Sarah to call our capitol "the tower of Babel."
Loren Eiseley, Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and Kent Haruf all lived in Lincoln, and many fine writers live here now. Historically we've been a white-collar town with three universities and many insurance companies and banks. In our town of 210,000 people, we have 170 churches, a symphony, a performing arts center, and a university film theater. Two tall-grass prairies and a wilderness park border Lincoln and make it possible for anyone to be "in the country" in fifteen minutes. In the last decade, we have had years in which no one was murdered.
At the same time we are becoming a much more diverse community, we are also becoming more like everywhere else. Lincolnites eat at the same chain restaurants and shop at the same corporate stores as everyone else. We have the same glitzy malls, movies, and music that people do in London, Manila, and Moscow. By now, the world is connected by American Express cards, media, computers, and airline companies. People can buy Kentucky Fried Chicken in Chiang Mai and Dallas Cowboy memorabilia in Burmese markets. The Marlboro man rides in Warsaw and, no matter where people travel, they can sleep in a Sheraton or Hilton. People in Siberia eat pizza and play golf, and people in Lincoln play bridge over the Internet with people from Taiwan.
Our city library now has books in Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and Urdu. Our colleges educate people from all over the world. Our citizens travel to the Galápagos or search for the wild ponies of Manchuria. But nowhere can they escape corporate logos. The local is no longer protected. The unique is vanishing. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman quoted a man as saying, "There are two ways to make a person homeless—destroy his home or make his home look like everyone else's."
These trends can be called many names but, for shorthand, I will call them globalization. Many writers