Bend Over While We Put a Shopping Mall on Your Back

I live in Suburbia. Its lush, its green, its quiet. Not to far away however, are a few towns that just plain suck. Sure they have the malls, the garages, the arcades and the freeways, but boy do they suck. They are dirty and smelly and full of sketchy looking punks who were their pants way to low.
I was in such a town about twenty minutes ago. I was helping my father pick up his chopper at this little bike shop in what used to be a huge factory complex. It was this huge bunch of buildings, maybe ten in all. Very large and old looking. Huge brick walls with cement pillars running up the corners. Large ugly windows, stained a dirty brown from years of filth and soot. It got me thinking, looking up there at the smokestacks and metal hangers, what ever happened to the poor schmucks who used to work here. Here I was, sitting in a big black SUV listening to Metallica on my IPod, and I was thinking about all the poor souls who would trudge their way here on foot, only to work eighteen hour days for chicken scratch.
Please don't start thinking I felt sympathy for these dead folks for long ago. I didn't. Its just that it made me think how everything around us is built on the backs of the previous generations. Maybe your town just got a new mall or a new freeway, but chances are it was built in the place of something else. Maybe it was just a replacement of something that was shitty. Maybe they cleared some forest out of the way. Maybe it was somebodies home that had to go. Whatever was there, well, it ain't there no more. People call it being progressive. Change is good, right? If its a step up, than its a step in the right direction. That seems to be the story anyway.
My town used to be beautiful. There were roads where you could drive on and think it suddenly turned into night because of all the trees lining it. Now there is these large developments, huge cookie-cutter houses. Each one looks the same, each one has the same three member family living it. Wasting a huge amount of space so their kids can have a playroom, a TV room, a reading room, a private bath, a study room and all this adds up to shat. Like the girl you took to the prom these McMansions are big and ugly and really don't make you feel any better about yourself. They are empty, the owners spent enough buying the damn things now they can't afford to furnish it.
I feel bad for the kids that have to grow up isolated in their own home. The place I grew up in wasn't small, but it wasn't large either. We each had our own room, which were kind of small, but they got the job done. We finished our basement so us kids could have someplace to watch TV. We ate dinner together at the kitchen table and actually talked to each other. So how, giving the fact I had a good home life, did I grow up to be the maladjusted man you see before you? Well, it was probably the poor choice of friends, the drugs I like to take, and the fact that I am not handsome nor charming. I, like everyone else in my town, has a false sense of entitlement. I deserve everything, and I don't have to give nothing back. The world is my oyster. I am white, I am male, and I am middle class. That alone puts me above most of the world.
So listen and listen good. I am not telling you to sell your house, sell your car and send your kids to work in a salt mine. I am just asking, look around you. See how everything you have was built by someone else. Your very foundation was laid on the graves on earlier generations. Your kids read textbooks with the names of dead children signed in the cover. Your home is not your home at all, but the future spot for a hover car factory, or a Robo-Exotica Lounge.