Since I’ve moved from my hometown, I’ve gone on sneering rants about how much the people in my home town are in a bubble, how if it’s not within the Texarkana city limits or anywhere within the two neighboring counties, they just don’t care to know about it. Selective myopia, small lives, out-of-sight out-of-mind, and so on.
And then it occurs to me: when was the last time I, or anybody I know in Austin, bothered to pay attention to and keep up with what’s happening outside our own city limits? Sure, our attention is split between local concerns, state, national, and international concerns, but who’s watching what’s going on in the neighboring cities like Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Lubbock, El Paso, San Antonio? Those are major cities. Problem is, most of us just don’t care. They’re not far enough away to be considered exotic or interesting destinations. They’re neighboring towns, and we treat them with disdain like siblings at the table. We Austin drivers hoist up our suspenders about how much better we are then those Houston drivers, or how we’re not as geographically consumptive as the DFW Metroplex, or how we’re not as backwards and boring as Lubbock. (The horror!)
So it’s clear. We have selective myopia of our own. No better than the rest.