Living in the Shadows

Here I am. The sun shines here nearly every day of the year and yet I'm living in the shadows. 1 out of every 24 minutes in my day is spent driving either to or from school. The story is much the same for most of my friends. We spend our lives learning about American history, European history, American government and so on. How are we connected to "American" history?

Well, we live in America. But what does that mean today? I'm almost closer to the Mexican border right now than Barack Obama is to the Lincoln Memorial. I live at the extreme end of America (well, maybe Alaska has that on me, but you never hear much from them). My communal history is informed by the Spanish explorers who first found this place and the Catholic missions they set up on this coast. My family history is deeply divided between contentedness with what was and thirst for more. Opposite faces of the American coin. And yet here, I feel lost.

I am living in the shadows. People, in my family and around us, try to replicate the culture that they had in other places and times. Baseball as the American past-time is the one example that comes screaming into my head. It doesn't pass well to my generation. The community we know is big houses getting bigger, strip malls tied together like excessive urban putty-string, and each dreamer hitching their hopes to the star of the "upper class".

What has been recreated here is a shadow. A shadow of what was in some other place real. It lacks authenticity in a way that leads me to question whether culture will ever originate here, rather than serving as the ending point in fading line of American divergence.