ROBIN WRITES: Small Town Supervision
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By Robin Garrison Leach
I was enjoying a slice of pie, skimming the headlines in the paper, when my mouth fell open in astonishment:
Well, get over it.
I grew up in a small town. My every movement has been recorded since the day of my birth. Yes, it was intrusive. Yes, I sometimes hated it. But there was no better deterrent to unacceptable behavior than to know that your neighbors were keeping their eyes on you, and that the mouths below those eyes were ready to report your actions in stark detail to whomever would listen.
Being watched is a fact of life in a small town. It is part of the price paid for living where every house has a front porch and a picture window. Maybe the time-honored tradition of neighbor-watching stems from the boredom of living where the biggest news is last Sunday’s sermon.
Where family surnames are as familiar as math times tables and the lineage is as easy to recite.
Maybe the simple, somewhat bland fare of our daily existence demanded daily pinches of spicy news for tongue-tingling satisfaction.
The recordings of your actions in a small town are never erased or destroyed. They are available to be rewound and replayed at the mention of your name. The tape may jitter a bit, or be revised by once-removed editors, but it was still considered gospel.
Your past is public knowledge, and nobody forgets your face.
Steal a candy bar in third grade, and caring, small-town citizens will consider it their civic duty to watch you for more confection crime the rest of your life. Be somewhere you shouldn’t after a high school football game and you can be sure your car’s description will be relayed—by party line—to every house along every road in town.
Your license plate numbers are memorized and your movements will be monitored for all of eternity.
In the harsh light of our changing society, I’m glad I grew up under the unblinking eyes of small-town neighbors. I learned that life was not a private endeavor. My actions to this day are still weighed against the consequences of inevitable detection, and the idea of surveillance cameras keeping track of me is not a big deal.
In fact, it makes me a little homesick.
To those for whom the thought of being recorded and watched by ‘Big Brother’ is unsettling: just smile for the cameras and keep your fingers away from your nostrils.
As I was always told: (1) ‘It’s for your own good.’ And (2) ‘We’re all one big family… whether you like it or not.’
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■ Robin is a freelance columnist who lives and writes in Quincy, Illinois. Contact her at [email protected].
