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A Parable, Kinda Sorta, or Maybe an Allegory

This can probably be taken a dozen different ways. Take what you will from it, and make of it what you will.

Once upon a time, there was a small town nestled in the mountains. The people who lived there were, by and large, simple. Which isn’t to say that they were simpletons, though simpletons could certainly be found without much effort.

In the town, you could find merchants, artists, carpenters, teachers, hippies, truck drivers, retirees, Republicans, Democrats, Catholics, Baptists, and even the occasional celebrity.

While not at work, you could find these folks on the school board, the city council, the county commission, in the Lions, the Elks, the Rotarians, or you could find them fishing, hunting, skiing or just futzing around in the yard.

You could find a lot of people who had very little in common working shoulder to shoulder maintaining a park, or trying to create scholarship programs for the school and, in general, making their little corner of the world a better place to live.

And so it was for many years.

Then, someone came to town and said, “I really like this place. It’s quiet and idyllic, and I would like to live here.”

So they did, and others followed. And while they thought they may have had the best interest of the town in mind, they brought along their own ideas which didn’t necessarily jibe with the way things had been done.

Some of the residents were resentful: Hell, we’ve been doing things this way for years, and I think things are just fine.

Some were more sanguine: Change is inevitable; we can adapt or keep thing the way they are.

In many respects both sides were right. There were things that were worth preserving: a strong sense of community, and of belonging to something larger and somewhat stable. There were also some things that needed to be changed.

In the final analysis, there were those who lamented the loss of what had been, so they moved on to different places.

There were also those who were all too willing to ignore the good things that had come before them and changed those things just for the sake of change. They remade the town in their own image.

Neither group was entirely right and neither group was entirely wrong, but the fact of the matter is that a good thing had been irretrievably lost; replaced with something that still bore the same name but was an altogether different creature.