I live in real America.

I was born in Oregon, most of my family still lives there. I was raised in Oklahoma, then joined the Marines, saw a bit of the world. Now I live in a medium-sized town in Wisconsin.

It’s nice here.

We’ve got some manufacturing, some light industry, some business. We’ve got a river and a lake. We’ve got a park called ‘Riverside Park’ – the river sweeps by the place in a gentle curve. There is a World War One cannon there, looking over the river, pointing at the boat house on the other side. A flagpole with lights. A pavilion.

There is a new playground there with a giant plastic rocket as a centerpiece – a businesses in town donated most of the money to build it.

I take my kids there some Saturdays. There are always a lot of kids in and around it.

All of the parks here have purpose built sledding hills.  We don’t have any natural hills you can sled on. So the city built them for the kids.

That’s pretty nice as well.

There are some things that are not so very nice.  They’re the same things that everyone else has problems with, everywhere: the economy, politics.

Those things come and go. Thirty, fifty years from now, people will still bring their kids to Riverside Park, just like their parents and grandparents did. They’ll sit on the same bench I sit on, and watch their kids do what mine do: run around, play, have fun.

That’s pretty nice.

What about your Real America?

Idea from Bard Bloom.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.