The Middle Lands: Should You Stay or Should You Go Now?
Years ago – decades – I read an extended article in The New York Times about the slow demise of the population that makes up the Midwestern United States – especially the non-urban Midwest. Young people were beginning to migrate to the coasts and the southwest in large numbers. America was losing its rural, breadbasket population.
What interested me in the article was not the fact that people were moving away in droves but the question of who was staying. Who was staying and why? Who was staying, why, and what was going to happen to that middle part of the country over the next five to ten decades because of those who stayed?
As I came to the end of my high school days in Columbia, Missouri back in 1976 all I wanted was to get the hell of Dodge. I was in heaven going to college in Portland, Oregon. That was major, bigtime city life for me. I still tell people, “Central Missouri,” when they ask where I’m from, even after 45 years in Philly.
Living on both the West and the East Coasts, I understand intimately how different those worlds are from Midwestern and Southern America. It is no wonder to me that our national politics have become such a circus of irrationality and hyperbole (on all sides). That circus mentality is where the idea of the Middle Lands comes from, and the idea of The Drift Away.
I see as well – we all do – how possible it is that over the next 20 to 30 years a large chunk of citizens may begin to think they want nothing to do with the cultures on and near the country’s coasts. For that matter, I don’t know what those of us living in big cities anywhere in America are going to feel about those middle and southern sectors of the country if the view of who we are as a nation continues to be so divergent.
We think of violence and dystopia when we think about nations splitting up. But this is America in the 21st century. Much as there is a minority who think in terms of aggression and antagonism, most of us just want to live our daily lives and do the best we can getting along with neighbors and co-workers. Here’s a passage from early in Sound Effect Infinity to describe how things might actually wind up:
*“Incompetence on all sides. People simply shifted and migrated to where they felt comfortable. The Middle Lands became a new kind of territory—still America but certainly not the United States thereof.” *
Buy Sound Effect Infinity now to see what happens when everything goes haywire and collective imagination grabs ahold of anything that seems like it might provide a morsel of escape.