I (Heart) New York

So we visited our home state last week and this post has been bouncing around in my head since then. It was very strange going out there and seeing things with fresh eyes after being gone for over a year and a half. I can now understand why my parents had been so vocal about getting us out here to Indy for the past several years. The easiest way to put it is that going back was like living with your Grandmother for 10 years then leaving and staying with your cousin and returning after 18 months to grandma's house and seeing how old she really is. You still love grandma but you see things that you were blind to, or refused to notice at the time. That is New York, I am and always will be a New Yorker, but driving past my old house and around our old town showed us how OLD the state is. Nothing had changed, hell even the fence I had repaired when we sold the house was falling down again. Now I appreciate the historic aspect of being an original colony and enjoy walking through a neighborhood that has stood since the 1800's and towns founded in the 1600's and the comfort of walking into the same pizzeria you did with your father and your father did with his father. But you also see the other side, the empty houses, the crappy streets, the closed businesses, the exodus of the population in search of jobs. It is a mixed feeling of joy at being home and the sadness to see what has happened or better yet what it was all along.

What caused it I wondered, certainly time but more importantly politics. Taxes, regulations, personal adjendas all lend to the demise of small town America and looking at the current state of the Thruway stops, small city America. I love New York but hate what has happened to it, I am glad I have moved my family west and have settled in a growing community but I know that the future of my town can easily reflect that of upstate New York if it is not properly planned for. What to do? I do not know but I am hoping that the people of New York can learn how to reverse the current trend and become the Empire State again and that us youngens can learn from them and preserve for our children a state better than the one we live in today.