Tear it Down

Last updated on: April 30, 2015 at 7:31 am by Anne Kennedy

Tear it Down 2015-04-30T07:31:41-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I happened to mention on Facebook last night that I cleaned the office.

This was true, in the very strictest construction of that word, “clean”. I did put things away and run the vacuum. And I also “cleaned” a bunch of other rooms, like the living room and dining room and school room and bathrooms. Because, you know, the dirt was piling up. But the only reason the picture above looks like it does is because I forced Matt to rearrange it. Well, not exactly forced. I'm not a fascist. I whined and moaned and kept mentioning how ugly the room was and when were we going to do anything about it until he was worn down to a shadow of himself.

For the last many months, because of the stupidity of the last arrangement, which tragically I think was my idea, whenever I swirled around in my chair to attend to some terrible noise, like a child shrieking, or the door being banged on, I was confronted with a great mass of wires and junk protruding from underneath Matt's desk. And then when I turned my head just slightly more, I had to stare at the horrible picture we hung up when the nail fell out of My Favorite Picture, the one on the wall now, the one of The Grand Canal. And I would cringe and feel sad and angry.

I wish, I wish very much, that I could carry on without being irritated by so many visual uglinesses. I was thinking this as I drove around Binghamton yesterday. It's not that I hate Binghamton….well, most of the time I don't hate it in the kind of loathing way that the word “hate” implies. It's that it's badly arranged. It has terrible feng shui, two words into which I am pouring all my own meaning and which I am not even taking one moment to fully research or understand, don't judge me. The hills are nicely arranged, and the two rivers that converge here. But God gets the credit for that. The sky above the hills displays all kinds of interesting configurations of clouds and colors. Even in the winter, the brown of the bare trees against the gray sky is not that unappealing. What is terrible about it all is what We of Binghamton, I'll just go ahead and include myself because I've lived here for nearly thirteen years now and I probably need to begin to take some kind of responsibility, have done to this landscape. It's not the lovely great houses arranged down the crumbling and horrifically paved Riverside Drive. Those are fine. It's not even down town which has some sort of faded sense of visual interest and lost glory. It's when you drive under those train tracks heading towards Bevier Street, and then you cut around down town and go over to Front Street and are smacked in the face with this gaping, foul, shockingly decrepit monolith that includes a KMart and a few other things but really looks like it's been bombed. It might as well have been through a war. It's that ugly and that depressing.

And then I really feel the weight of cultural sadness and refuse to pretend that I'm from here, because there is something sort of very American, to try to hedge this mean thing that I think every day, there is something very pragmatic about this crumbling eyesore of a strip mall. It's not the only one here in this town. They are actually all over. And not in this town only but in every town. Every town in America has this exact set of stores. And what I want to know is, Really? And Wherefore? And Can we tear them all down? We're tearing everything else down–marriage is the one that springs immediately to mind. In this new world order where Christians will ever more creep around and probably eventually have to run away, where people do whatever they want without the rule of law or a defining cultural norm of right or wrong, where the reputations of people are allowed to be destroyed utterly, without grace, without mercy, without human compassion, on the basis of one 140 character tweet, where voting the wrong way in some states will now get you a midnight visit by the police (and don't yell at me, I'm not going to take the trouble to link all these news items, surely everyone reading me knows how to cope with Google), in this new uglier world, can the strip malls also be torn down? There won't be anything to put in their place, but maybe God could have the land back, the acres of concrete and sadness.

In the meantime, as the American pragmatism foments and rages and crumbles around me, I will try to beat back the ugliness, room by room, in my own small domain.

And on that note, I had better get back to the vacuum. Pip Pip.

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