The word "urban" to me means city. City like New York. City like L.A. City like Chicago. Like not suburban or country. I'd call where we live suburban, but it's rapidly going urban. When does the sub find itself scrubbed from the property and ground down into "urban?" And it's definitely a down not an up, for although some call it progress, it (urbanization) drags pollution and overcrowding, crime and stress along with it, making tranquility its victim, sanity a mortality statistic, like soldiers in a war meant to conquer poverty in a place that didn't want the ravages of civilization anyway, thanks.
"Whither the wildflowers?" we ask. Whisked away, the wildflowers would want to wave wistfully in wide women's backyards, but will waste away in the wagons with wooden wheels drawn by dirty white horses every Wednesday during the week and every third weekend at the end of every month ending in a "y."
The wagons went West, the wildflowers wilted, and Urbanity laughed to see them go, triumphant again--restaurant chains, drugstore and hardware store chains muscling each other in the background for newly paved-over wildflowers. Man's striving to have more had created a place to escape FROM on the very next plane to find the open spaces where the wildflowers grow wild, but not the people because there is peace in the wilds. Contradictions notwithstanding, the open spaces beckon closed minds formerly full but now emptied by predatory purveyors and pedantic preachers. Pus-carrying pimples on pre-pubescent people in countries no longer confined to the U.S. but bleeding globally, harbor no longer in solely U.S. ports, but spread beyond borders in electronic vastness making no one immune to the disease of progress in the 21st century.
