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The official student news site of Coppell High School

Coppell Student Media

The official student news site of Coppell High School

Coppell Student Media

The official student news site of Coppell High School

Coppell Student Media

Business Spectacle: Lilys Hair Studio (video)
Business Spectacle: Lily's Hair Studio (video)
October 26, 2023

Modernization endangers community; defeats the idea of small towns

By Alex Irizarry
Staff Writer

Picture this: it is a bright Sunday afternoon and people are flooding out of the local church. The smell of barbecue and apple pie fills the air everywhere you look, people sit in lawn chairs, talking, laughing and having a great time. A young boy rides past you on his 10-speed bike, tossing the morning paper onto cleanly cut lawns as he whizzes past them. There are no walled communities, no malls, no shopping complexes, no greasy fast food chains; this is the American small town.

In today’s America this seems like a fantasy, the delusional creation of someone who has seen just a bit too many Twilight Zone episodes. It is just too foreign a concept for this generation to understand, people have grown to used to their fancy homes, materialistic items and the seclusion social media allows them. Small towns are no fantasy, but given the rate the world continues to push modernization, they are getting closer to fairy tale with every turn of the clock.

Take Coppell for instance, our town would seem much like the ideal small town of old, but there are a few setbacks. It is a town where I could leave my doors unlocked and not be afraid that I will come back to an empty parking space or a newly empty space on my wall where the TV used to be. We have the community, but most of our events only make a vague attempt at being social. We have many homegrown businesses, but we are also overrun by fast food businesses on almost every block. And every five seconds, it seems we are are building something new.

There has not been a week gone by in the past eight months that there has not been construction going on in some part of town. Cypress Waters, the new complex with Smashburger and Einstein Bros, road improvements and constant updating of restaurants and buildings. The problem with Coppell is that we focus too much on being new, on becoming that next best thing.

A small town can never be the next best thing because the idea of a small town is one from our past. The people in those towns did not care about the latest trends or having the newest phone. They did not care about popularity, and that set them free. They did not need fancy townhomes or shiny new McDonald’s lining the streets. People could be who they were and not be afraid of how they will be treated by their peers. You do not hear about mass killings or crime sprees or rapists there, because the community is so close that no one would think of doing so. The community becomes family because they do not focus on the materialistic world. They never lose sight of the most important part of our lives, and one of the only parts that truly matter, relationships.

Contrary to the popular belief, Facebook is not nor will it ever be a replacement to real people. Text messages are not a proper substitute to real conversation and school events do not constitute as being social. But in today’s America, that is how things work. We do not trust our neighbors, we are suspicious of things we do not know, we do not allow for freedom because we live in fear. All we are ever told is what we cannot do, what we should not do and it gets to the point where everything seems safer inside a giant plastic ball.

Fifty years ago, children could not wait to get away from their homes. They would go to drive in movies, hang with friends at the local drug stores or go out for a day at the beach. They went out of their way to be with people instead doing everything in their power to avoid them. That simply does not happen anymore, we are encouraged to hide ourselves from the world and forget the old. We are told we need to have the newest thing, that we need to be better than we were, that everything new is better and that the past will only hinder us. But in reality, it is the other way around, the more and more we move away from our past the more we will lose what makes us human.

The small towns, the little people, are the ones with the right idea. Without this simple idea, our whole social order could collapse. So go outside, sit by a fire and just be without the glare of a cell phone creeping into the picture.

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