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Corporatization risks elimination of small town feel

Emily Brown

Oxford, beware.

There's a thick, heavy ball that someone got rolling some time ago, a ball that is strikingly similar to a demolition ball. It's been cruising along at a steady enough pace, wrecking the old water tower, pulling up trees and leaving fast food burritos in its wake. Now it's picked up momentum and there's no slowing it, let alone stopping it, or its destruction. It's cruising straight toward us and all we can manage is a sigh and a shrug as it knocks down and takes out the temptations of Oxford (sweet temptress gone a year, hemp visions crashing down) or zips through our green space, smashing our crops and ruining beautiful Sunday afternoon drives in the country. Country no more, for soon endless parodies of homes will pop up from the earth-like hungry parasites ingesting the bare brown dirt of destruction. This demolition ball has no regard for preserving the sacrosanct. If it isn't apparent, the sacrosanct is Oxford's graceful small town splendor that is hastily metamorphosing into a corporate ghost town.

This unstoppable force has tarnished the historic elegance of uptown Oxford, profaning it with the unbeatably hideous storefronts of national fast food chains while simultaneously handing out grievances to one of the few locally-owned businesses left.

Too much color, radiant, vivid, appealing color, they claim. Color like that, they say among themselves, will attract too much attention, too much business, it will ruin our plan to obliterate small businesses and sell the town for pennies to Master Lobster and Princess Wendy.

Wal-Mart was the beginning. It enticed other national corporate chains to come take a piece of the pie - a pie that belongs (or is it too late for that - belonged?) to Oxford citizens and their small businesses. We see them quietly closing up shop without too much protest, but if hotshots from corporate, purporting "fresh" foods and "healthy" entrees, broach the sanctity of our local businesses, it cannot remain a silent sin. If we allow our unique locales to wink out, we're doing an injustice to this small town, and most surely to ourselves.

Who wants to attend college in a ghost town? To learn in a metropolis of empty paper coffee cups and discarded glutton? The small businesses will surely lose out to those with more power, more capital and more flexibility to lose three months of steady business. Then, uptown will clear out and what big business would fit into the narrow lobby of beloved Bodega, Uptown Cafe or Bagel and Deli or desire the unattractive face of Phan Shin, the out-of-the-way locale of Spaghetti's or Paesano's? Where would all the people eat? Where will we go when there's nothing for us but reheated frozen food and no love, care or creativity to keep us hopeful and alive?

This cycle of corporate consumerism has no place, no positive purpose in a town like Oxford. When we come to visit in 20 years, none of us will be ready to find a mess of plastic stores with plastic food and plastic people. Now think, would we want that if we lived here?


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