After being away for a semester, I traveled back to the small town that I called home. It was an hour drive, and my grandparents were more than excited to see me. I pulled into the familiar driveway and nostalgia swept over me. Home. With that word came peach cobbler, beagle puppies, crunching leaves, and old Western films. I spent the evening in my warm household, just as I had left it four months earlier.
It wasn't unsettling until I went to town the next day. I saw the same people working the same jobs. Wearing the same expressions. The same teenagers hanging out where they always did. The same car that was abandoned on the side of the road still sat in the same spot.
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It was like my town was caught in a time capsule. I had a vast array of new experiences; eye-openers that changed my perspective on nearly everything. I was different. Why hadn't anything else outside of Berea changed?
The static qualities of the town were not endearing. The blind ignorance that it's inhabitants clung onto was not excusable. They did not know of life outside of the confines of their community, and I thought that they should. Who wouldn't care about poverty, racism, and sexism if they knew about it?
It angered me to see these people doing nothing to help the world around them.
I didn't overcome this anger until a few visits later when my opinions had changed.
As long as they were happy, who was I to ruin it? I was the same as them once. I didn't think of life outside of my town, and I was content with that. The issues that had become important to me were not so in the past. It was not my place to feel elite for knowing more about the world. The people living in that small town are content with their existence, and it is not anyone's right to rob them of that.
