(May 19, 2015 at 8:27 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: When my family fled the Iranian revolution in 1978, we landed in ... wait for it ... East Texas. I went from a cosmopolitan private school with an international set of friends to a place where they thought anyone who'd been outside Camp County was "worldly". I didn't know until that moment exactly what my parents' decision to move overseas had wrought in me -- but at that point, I realized, belatedly, that what we had lived was special ... in no large part because it kept me from ever being a normal American, ever again.
Once I understood that lesson, that horizons are moveable, I chased it with a vengeance. And to hell with the yokels who worship at home and hearth.
Most people live in a little snowglobe, and never even realize it.
I haven't been to East Texas, but I do know that much of the gene pool in the panhandle is scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. That must have been a true culture shock, because Texans are extremely insulated. Even my own relatives look at me like I'm a foreigner, because I'm from Michigan.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
