Protecting Oakdale From Itself

Living in Oakdale means living much living alone: that is, aside from chance encounters between entering and leaving one's car and what happens outside of work contexts (which are themselves restricted to the need to complete certain duties, with little room for play), there is relatively contact with people that are unfamiliar, whose very presence and story is likely very familiar to oneself, the function of habit and routine movement and engagement.

It is this personal distance that serves as the cyclically reinforcing basis for the distrust that pervades this little town.

In my opinion, it is very clearly based on a sense that we are all relatively similar, living in a homogenous community of people with basically the same beliefs such as ourselves that we maintain a sense of distance, of distrust. We assume they are like us, meaning there difference itself is thrust aside entirely, evaded or ignored or deliberately covered.
It is possible, though not certain, that this disposition, however, also caries with it something much darker, more reproachable and even unsettling: the deep disapproval, even ostracization; that is, an unwillingness, a disinterest in engaging with difference in any serious or profound or self-sacrificing manner, preventing us from relating to one another in any serious way, holding even our neighbors in suspicion.

One of my enduring curiosities is whether this kind of marginalization is merely typical of rural settings like this or if it is part and parcel of being human, as we may tend towards our own, preserving and preferring a sense of group identity and community.

A strong distrust of others, in fact, seems essential to any appreciation of the rural, as it originates in the very sense that a previous community has been/was incapable of providing for its members and thus needed to be left behind or replaced. Or, it comes from a longstanding inability to deal with established communities of people and instead prefers to remain in areas undepicted, unrepresented.

In either or whatever case, this way of living calls into question the presumption that being human means living in and coming from a part of some community, or merely qualifies the essential nature of that community.

Or, perhaps, in another way, what it instead signifies is that our community idolizes something possibly inimical to itself - complete and probably under-evidenced self-reliance, an ideology that nevertheless persists and explains our doubts about the ability of the state to make good on the desires of the people.

Such is the state of trust in this place without a place.