Obsessive Component

I have to give a personal narrative in my speech class today. I'm supposed tell some tale significance to my family or culture. I struggled for a while with the idea, because as a white male athiest raised in the bible-belt, my cultural history doesn't extend much further back than Thriller.
Here's what I threw together. I think it's just obsessive enough to be a componant. Peas.

I thought hard about what to speak on and only drew blanks.

I thought about embellishing some scrap of family history or making something up completely.

I'm sure there are many wonderful tales of family tradition and the hardships of immigration hanging on the branches of my family tree. But neither myself, my parents, or my grandparents have heard or choose to remember anything notable.

I doubt that my situation is uncommon.

Unlike the close knit immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago or New York that have celebrated their old world heritage with pride. I was born and grew up in the cultural vacuum of Middle-America that consumes the other 98% of the nation.

Some people have taken to calling it the Heartland, but any heart is purely artificial.

The view of American heritage presented to me was one of fast food chains, strip malls, and pre-fab trailer homes.

Every construct in my environment was designed to be cheap to build, quick to throw up and quicker to tear down.

I saw my small town's quaint downtown area turn into a ghost-town within a year of the Mall opening.

While our downtown wasn't Budapest, it was made up of locally owned businesses housed in well constructed buildings

Some still in the late displayed yellow and black metal signs showing that it would be used as a fallout shelter if the commies nuked us carrying out their insidious plans of world domination.

In the years before I left, that Mall became unpopular and the corporate chain stores fled back to wherever they came from. Most malls built in the 70's and 80's are empty. Consumer tastes changed again apparently.

Super Wall-Mart, Borders, The Gap built Lots on the other side of the freeway and put up tacky grey concrete and painted aluminum stores waiting to be torn down within 10 or 15 years.

my point is that it's no surprise that with the temporary nature of my community's surroundings and the near-sighted dedication to "progress" that any "antiquated" notions of heritage would be forgotten just as quickly.

Within less than 200 years, the "culture" of small towns like mine has become homogenized into a tangable sense of pride in the collective ignorance and xenophobia of the citizens.

Any cultural family ritual that doesn't begin in an automobile and end at Denny's is considered suspect.

Jews, Hindus, Catholics, Islamists, and atheists are well advised to begin worshiping our federally approved deity at the new high-tech mega-church conveniently located just off I-40.

This way the other citizens won’t worry about you holding any funny allegiances to some backward foreign land that would rather not be modernized by America’s gracious corporate representatives.

I never felt happy with this arrangement. So I have left the bland wonder bread safety of middle-America and moved into a large culturally diverse metropolitan city. I feel more at home here than I ever did in the town that I was born.

A steadily growing number young people who grew up in my situation are doing the same and many smaller cities are driving away the young talent they will need to grow economically.

The importance of cultural heritage, art, music and ceremony respected and practiced by generations for hundreds maybe thousands of years is huge and should not be lost to ideas of nationalism or progress.

I may never know where my great-great-great-grandparents were born or of the rigors of the frontier that they helped build, but the lessons I’ve learned about the fragile nature of society could be just as important.