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Growing up in Western Pennsylvania is important. By this, I think I mean that 'ol PA made me who I am today, at this moment, in an insano number of ways. It gave me my dialect, it handed me terminology that no one else in the world understands, and it kept me in the bubble of American existence that most suburbanites are comfortable to exist in all of their lives.
It taught me that racism does in fact exist, and can be very, very close to you if you don't know how to let go of comfort in culture. It taught me that moral conservatives are elected into office by people who do think and act reasonably, yet somehow have a missing cellular connection in their brains that makes them able to empathize with those less-fortunate. It taught me that the chance of a youth revolution happening in one of the oldest counties (per capita) in the country is relatively impossible until all of those old hats die off and new ones are created.
But more importantly, Western PA taught me that life is both a very centralized experience, and a very broad-reaching understatement. I realized now that I'd been eating hot dogs and hamburgers and being afraid of black people and doing far too many drugs for all my young life. Certainly, I was born into that bubble of limited understanding, limited comprehension, and limited resources to make both of the former possible. Granted, my parents are some of the more-liberal folks I grew up around, and i was never subjected to the 'O Reiley Factor-as-Saturday morning cartoon replacement. And my grandfather was a steel worker, probably one of the best things that ever happened to America, and one of the worst things that happened to the land. And the educators and mentors that shaped my young mind were far from the staunchest possible.
But the bubble of Western Pennsylvania is ultimately responsible for the present. For my life, and perhaps, yours. The world that I've come from, built from shopping center excursions and loops around back country roads to enjoy libations; from praying along with Pirate games on the radio to dying along with Steelers games in negative-twelve degree snow, sleet and ice; from falling in love with every girl I met to breaking hearts along the way; from the little conservative, hyper-Christian boy I was when I entered high school, to the drugged-out, culturally oversaturated hippie/raver/punk rocker/indie fag that I entered college as; and certainly from the boy I'll never be again to the man I might never become, Western Pennsylvania's woods and streets and bars and libraries and schools and neighborhoods are responsible for the words and chords you hear today.
I used to fear for the future because of the present. Now I'm sure that the only way around the present is to celebrate our inequities, our shortcomings, and our losses, all the while hoping that we will gather together in harmonious collections of individuals who have nothing better to do that "the right thing." Or, if that's asking too much, at least as a bunch of drunk assholes who just want to scream at the Steelers every time Holmes drops a punt return. Either way, I wouldn't trade it for the world.
