History Quotes / TownWithADarkSecret

->''Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People are everywhere in fiction. You see them in Westerns: they are the wonderful quaint little villages whose inhabitants get along fabulously with the native Indians and who need rescuing from evil land barons who want to take their land. You see them in sitcoms: they are the good-hearted out-of-towners who visit the city and don't understand strange alien concepts like "violence" and "crime". You hear about them in songs: John Cougar Mellencamp waxed poetic about life in small towns, and he wasn't exactly the only singer to do so. There's no escaping Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People. They till the land. They love their children. They never swear, they don't commit crimes, they are never violent. They hate technology. They live the wholesome life, as a shining example to all of us, the unwashed masses.\\\
The problem is that they're a myth. In real life, small-town people really aren't that much different from big city people. I've lived in both large cities (~5 million inhabitants) and very small towns (<3000 inhabitants), and I'm speaking from experience. Once you account for the huge population difference, there is just as much crime, violence, drug use, teen pregnancy, etc. in small towns as there is in big cities (note that I'm talking about decent suburbs, not the burned out cores of certain American cities -- I drove through UsefulNotes/{{Detroit}} once and I must admit that I was scared).\\\
But there's a darker aspect of the wonderful Wholesome Small-Town Life: racism. No, I'm not just being hyper-sensitive and seeing sinister intent in casual glances. I'm talking about being asked (dozens of times) what it's like in China (my answer? "If you ever visit there, let me know"). I'm talking about being told by numerous people that my children, the product of a mixed race relationship, might suffer serious birth defects because "the genes don't match". I'm talking about listening to some guy use the word "nigger" over and over in casual conversation, assuming that I wouldn't be offended because he was attacking a different visible minority from my own. I'm talking about a woman telling me, to my ''face'': "you should stay with your own kind." I haven't been hallucinating after watching civil rights documentaries: these incidents ''actually happened''. And every one of them happened in a small town, surrounded by Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People.''
-->-- '''Mike Wong''', ''Website/StarDestroyerDotNet'', discussing the Ba'ku from ''Film/StarTrekInsurrection''

Goin' down to Innsmouth gonna leave my woes behind\\