Anytown, USA

Last month I took a trip to North Carolina for a graduation party for my two daughters. One graduated from Baylor with a bachelors in health sciences-the other graduated from high school and will be attending Auburn in the fall. I am very proud of the both them.

During my visit, I noticed that I could literally close my eyes, board a plan in the U.S., land somewhere else in the U.S. and there wouldn't be anything differentiating one location from the next. America has morphed into a geographical homogeneous cliche of itself. Wal-mart, McDonalds, Jack-in-the Box, Target, Home Depot-everywhere you go, there they are. I remember taking a trip to the island of Maui in 2005 and I couldn't contain my excitement; vacationing on a tropical island paradise. The plane landed, we disembarked, picked up our luggage and the rental only to drive out the airport and right in front of us was a Home Depot, a Wal-mart and my eyes glazed over at that point. Somehow I don't recall seeing a bright-orange Home Depot sign in my fantasy of this tropical paradise.

Why have we allowed the oligarchs to circumvent the artists? Why has consumerism trumped environmentalism, or the preservation of the world's natural beauty? Hawaiians never needed a damn Home Depot. If they did, they would have built one themselves. Home Depot decided it needed Hawaii, and firmly planted itself in the way of my tropical island paradise.

There was a time you could travel to any place in the U.S. and that place would have a personality of it's own. The architecture, the local culture, even the language was geographically unique. Now, everywhere you go you bump into the manufactured M-TV culture that is neither unique nor interesting.

Starbucks (another eyesore on the geographical landscape) was kind enough to install a kiosk in the North Carolina hotel I was staying in and one morning I decided I needed a pick-me-up. I stood in a very short line, and when my early 30's Caucasian barista asked me what I wanted, I answered, "Grande Soy Mocha please." She then looked up at the ubiquitous flat-screen on the wall where John Legend was performing in New York's Central Park and began speaking to me in a vernacular unfitting North Carolina. I looked deep into this woman's mouth (to the point where I could see her tonsils) and wondered to myself if she'd swallowed a sista' from M-TV's hip-hop show 106th and Park. Her dialect was perfect-for someone aptly name Shaniqua. I remember feeling a little sad. I didn't want to hear her speaking that way. And trust me, it wasn't an affectation, that was her normal, everyday way of speaking. What happened to the southern drawl? I know, I know, it often sounds slow and backwoods, but I know better. Southerners aren't anymore intellectually challenged than the rest of the nation.

It bothers me to see the United States converted into this television culture that is instructed to wear the same clothes, speak the same dialect, shop at the same discount centers, all the while refusing to rage against the suppression of artistic and individual expression. Trust me, a tribal tattoo isn't an expression of individuality if EVERYONE has one. Nor is multiple piercings, colored hair, or the dreaded tattooed sleeve. In my opinion these people aren't trying hard enough. Dying your hair purple is easy-it's far from counter-culture. If you're sitting on your couch in front of cable TV watching The Hills, with purple hair or a tattooed forearm, or a tongue, belly, or clit-hood ring, you're not an individual. You're just a poor imitation of someone who once was a member of a counter-culture but has since moved on.

In her high school days my girlfriend made her own clothes. Bored with the unofficial 'uniform' all other high school kids wore, she designed her own fashion. Was she ridiculed? Yes, she was. Did it pay off in the end? Yes, it did. She ended up being a noted and Academy Award nominated costume designer. And all of those high school kids who looked at her as though she was an alien from another planet, well they're still walking around wearing someone else's uniform.

This country gave the world jazz, blues, rock, rhythm and blues, rap, hip-hop. As controversial a figure as he might have been, we gave birth to Michael Jackson-a global figure who inspired the world up to and beyond the day of his death. Why are we settling for the cookie-cutter imaginings of those void of imagination? What happened to the rebel spirit that raged against the status quo and made a counter-culture art form born on the streets of New York a world-wide phenom? Rap and hip-hop records can be found in almost every language on the planet.

I hope we don't lose our spirit to be free; free from Blockbuster Video, and Home Depot and Starbucks coffee. I hope that we celebrate the individual that lives in all of us and continue to design from our imagination and not from some prefabricated snap-in-place, void of creativity, mind prison. I hope that one day we realize that in order to be one self, one has to listen to one self-not the homogenized corporate radio with the same play list of artist whether you're in Hollywood California or Hollywood Florida. I hope we pull our children away from the i-Carly's and the Hannah Montana's of the world and give them the space they need to develop their own voices without Disney whispering some subliminal message lowering their self-esteem. And if one day we do decide to speak with one voice in this country, I hope it is a voice of our own design. Not one crafted by profit motivated oligarchs who couldn't care less about us, the planet or the future of our children.

TPOKW?