This Is a Great Place to Raise a Family!

Most of my colleagues are not from this area. Like me, they only moved here for work. Whenever we discuss life in our small town on the border between Missouri and Illinois, we always agree that the area is boring, the climate is nasty, the food is bland and unhealthy, the culture is non-existent, and overall this is not a fun place to live. However, this kind of conversation always ends with my colleagues exclaiming joyfully, "But this is a great place to raise a family!"

For the longest time, I had no inkling what they meant by this. I find it hard to imagine a worse kind of environment in North America to raise children. For one, it's all highways. Kids can't go out to play with their friends, or anything like that. They have to rely on their parents to drive them around. From what I have been able to observe, the only way a child of a non-driving age has to play with other children is when a parent arranges a play-date (and what a vile, unhealthy invention that is), drives the kid there, and sits around waiting for the poor child to be done playing. Teenagers are also stuck at home after the school bus brings them back from school. In the street where I live, there are several teenagers. What a sad sight they make! They can't do anything or go anywhere, unless, once again, a parent agrees to drive them. And then bring them back. The whole roaming the streets with your gang of friends, sitting in coffee-shops, and playing the guitar in the square, which is what teenage life should be about, is absent from their lives.

Everything - the food, the clothes, the people, the landscape - is so uniformly and mind-numbingly bland that any intellectual growth for a child can hardly be expected. To grow intellectually one needs new experiences, sights, smells, sounds, colors, languages, people. Here, there is nothing of the kind. Even I have to make an effort not to stagnate intellectually. I, at least, am a mature adult who has a lot of free time to travel and see other places. If I were to stay permanently stuck here, I doubt much would happen for me in terms of intellectual development.

This small-town Midwestern lifestyle is not only bad for the life of the mind. It's also not extremely conducive to the health of the body. The excessive reliance on cars coupled with the very unhealthy food are almost a guarantee of obesity and low health.

Why, then, do so many people insist that this is such a great place to raise a family? After 15 months in this area, I think I have finally been able to figure it out. The reason why people say this is racism, pure and simple. What this area doesn't have (or almost doesn't have) is non-white people and immigrants. It gets to the point where - for the first time in all of my years on this continent - I find myself in a situation where many of the locals don't understand me when I speak to them. And believe me, my English is very good, with only a trace of an accent. How sad is it that people are so unprepared to deal with even such a minor difference as the one I represent?

Racism blinds the proponents of raising kids in this environment to the fact that racial and cultural diversity is the only thing that can bring relief to such painfully boring, stagnant places.

An International Faculty Member in the Midwest

My university has had some problems with soliciting donations and getting external funding because it hasn't shown a deep enough commitment to promoting diversity among students and faculty members. So now the administration is doing its best to show how much we, the international faculty members, are appreciated. Today, for example, we had yet another reception with our Dean where every international faculty member was given a really cool (and expensive) gift.

It isn't easy being an international faculty member on the border between Illinois and Missouri. The food options are non-existent, ethnic foodstores and restaurants can only be encountered if your drag yourself over all the way to St. Louis. People have trouble understanding even those of us whose English is really fantastic. I've lived in many different places on this continent, but this is the first area where people have trouble understanding my English, which, believe me, is not heavily accented at all. Life in this area is really boring, which is very difficult for international academics to get used to. Everybody looks the same, dresses the same, speak the same way, and has had the same (very limited) life experiences. Foreigners stick out like sore thumbs in the midst of this uniformity.

This is why it's so rewarding to feel that one's foreignness is at least appreciated by the university administration. I think it's very useful for the students to see some variety in the kind of faculty members who teach them. Our presence in the classroom is enough to show the students that different ways of being, thinking and relating to the world exist.

Why Are Young Americans So Interested in Religion?

I was grading my students' essays yesterday and was taken aback by how many of them thought it necessary to mention that they are Christians. Believe me, I did not solicit this information from them in any way. They had to show an admirable degree of inventiveness to insert this information into an essay on a completely unrelated topic. This made me wonder why so many young Americans, especially in the Bible Belt where I happen to live for the moment, are so interested in religion.


In other developed countries, you will be hard-pressed to find anybody in their teens and twenties who would mention their religious affiliation with this degree of insistence. Most young people in Western Europe have no religious affiliation. Even in Spain, the country where a Catholic fascist dictatorship remained in power until 1975, you will not find anybody younger than 50 attending Mass. Even 50-year-olds are few and far between at religious functions. Most people who give any thought at all to religion in Spain are in their 70ies and 80ies. So why are young Americans so different from their European peers in this regard?
Part of the answer might be that if you don't go to church in this area of the country, there is nothing else to do, no other way to entertain yourself and spend time with other kids your age. Churches are the only institutions that organize activities for kids and young adults. Otherwise, life in the American Midwest is mind-numbingly boring. Young people here can't go to bars or night-clubs until they are 21. Even then, there are hardly any bars and night-clubs worth visiting. Most of them are geared towards a far older clientele. In the tiny college town where I live, there are quite a few pricey bars and restaurants where a university professor can go to partake of expensive wine and gourmet dinners. There is one sleazy looking place where one can go to dance and imbibe really horrible liquor. There are a couple of family-oriented bars/cheap restaurants. There is one tiny movie theater that is sold out pretty much every weekend. And that's all there is for miles and miles and miles. Mind you, our town is the liveliest place in the area. The rest of small towns here don't even have these paltry entertainment choices.

It isn't so surprising, then, that kids gravitate towards churches. This, of course, works to the advantage of the religious Right. These children and young adults can be brainwashed at an early age and turned into faithful Republican voters starting with their very first visit to the voting booth.

Midwestern Eating Habits

So yesterday we went to celebrate the first day of classes at this really nice restaurant here in town. The food was great and the service was good, albeit way too friendly for my liking, as is common here in the Midwest.

The only thing that was very weird to me is that at 9:30 we were practically pushed out of the restaurant, even though we kept ordering expensive drinks. This is one of the Midwestern habits that people from Europe find very hard to adapt themselves to. You are supposed to have dinner at surprisingly early hours, and just when the fun is supposed to begin, you are asked to clear out. My friends from Spain who normally dine at 11 pm always suffer greatly because of this strange habit.

One of the hardships of existence in small American towns is that they practically die out at sundown. This is why life feels so tedious and gloomy in small-town America.

Coffee Shops and Guns in Indiana

I love the Midwest. I always have very strange experiences here. Yesterday on the way from the airport, for example, we drove next to a place called "Pistol Range" that announced "Public Shooting Saturdays and Sundays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m." I'm trying not to attach any Kafkaesque interpretations to this.

Right now, five armed men entered the Starbucks where I'm writing this blog. I assume they are police officers (based on how relaxed everybody's reaction to them is) although there is nothing in or on their clothes and baseball hats that would actually identify them as such. Two of the men keep futzing with their guns, touching them in an almost caressing way. None of the other patrons in this coffee shop seem to mind or even notice. I, however, can't bring myself to relax. I don't remember ever being in a room with one gun, let alone five.

At the same time, as unsettling as this experience might be, it is not nearly as scary as my memory of being accosted by a group of street preachers here in West Lafayette last summer. I was having coffee at a streetwalk coffee shop, when this guy came up to me and staring at me in a very intent way asked: "Are you ready to die??" It took me some time to realize that he was a street preacher offering salvation and not a crazed killer.