Muncie Directive:
Ambivalence. My thoughts and feelings about Muncie are mixed. I can give you a list of positives and, probably more readily, a review of the negatives. Depending on the day, one perspective outweighs the other. On the whole, I would probably argue that it’s not as bad a place as some people think, but its problems are real and deep, and they will not be easily fixed. I find a lot of local boosters to be Pollyannaish. But some critics tend to be over the top. So, despite the fact that I have lived here for twenty years, and have a job that brings me into contact with many facets of local life, I remain uncertain. I see positives, but I can’t shake the sense that the city is stuck.
This uncertainty about Muncie has been a constant for me in a personal sense. When we (my wife and I) moved here our expectation was that this place would be a stop on the way to something else, perhaps for a few years, perhaps less. I didn’t mind living here at first, but I also didn’t expect to be around long, so it didn’t matter much either way. But the job went well and my wife found satisfying work. As a result, we are still here after 22 years, having raised two kids, purchased a house, and built a life of family, careers, friends, and activities. We’re not ready to retire yet, but the end point of our formal working lives is becoming easier to envision. The question that arises is whether we want to stay here once retired. It would be cheap and easy to stay, and, as I said, we’ve built a life here. The idea of going somewhere else and starting anew in our sixties is not an altogether attractive one. It seems like too much work to me. On the other hand, I doubt our kids will end up near here, and, having lived most of my adult life far from my family, I’d like to be near enough to them to see them reasonably often. And it’s cold here (I’m writing in February). And while there are some things to do, there are not so many that it’s all that attractive. So I don’t know. We will see where the kids end up and how we feel when the time comes.
Let’s talk about the reasons I’ve liked Muncie over my time here. Probably the best thing about it is that it’s size and character brings people together in ways that other places would not. I know a lot of people from across town—black and white, rich and poor, conservative and liberal. Although we live in a nice, suburban neighborhood with a comfortably large house, I don’t feel like I’m residing in an enclave, walled off (figuratively or literally). In our former, also suburban, neighborhood, our neighbors included both our lawyer and the person who picked up our trash. That’s an increasingly rare and valuable thing in today’s America. I have to say, though, that I worry about the future of that neighborhood, which has seen both the closing of its elementary school and its pool. It’s not as attractive a place as it was when we lived there.
Generally, I like the people here. Most are nice but I find many are narrow in their outlook. These days, we’re acutely conscious of the fact that while some people organize their life around their hometown and family, others (myself included) have wandered far from both in pursuit of a career. It leads to different outlooks, and we need to respect both. But I still chafe sometimes when engaging with people who have little interest in or experience with the world beyond Muncie, and Indiana. That truncated horizon seems to limit their willingness to try to understand people different from them and it shapes their politics in ways I don’t respect.
Life is also easy here. Years ago, when my mother-in-law visited, she would ask how for a store, a doctor’s office, or a restaurant was from our house. Invariably, the answer was ten minutes. She insisted that wasn’t possible, that everything couldn’t be that close. But it was pretty much true. (Of course, as I write this, I realize it is also evidence of the fact that there’s’ not that much going on here, so it’s all grouped together.)
My kids did well here, perhaps better than if they grew up in a middle-class suburb. They thrived in school and they got to know a good mix of people. Despite its reputation, I found the Muncie schools to be fine. Of course, having two educated parents provided them with a good deal of supplemental support. I’m not sure how well local schools work for students who don’t have the same resources at home. Our children got exposed to a good range of activities: sports, music, theatre, civic work and probably had more opportunities because they were in a smaller place with a little less competition. There were frustrations: the overemphasis on sports probably being the largest of them. But most of my dissatisfactions about education here are policy-oriented. I think it’s ridiculous that everyone in the county is not responsible for the education of every kid in it. There is no reason why someone living just over Morrison Road, in Yorktown, should not be responsible for the education of children living a few miles away in South Muncie. There are only 115,000 people in this county and we have 7 (or 8 depending on how you count) school districts. I grew up in a county with nearly a million people and one school district. We tolerate and even celebrate these kinds of divisions, which are largely about class and race, and they cripple us in so many ways, nowhere more so than in education.
My plan for this response was to turn to some of the negative thoughts and feelings I have about Muncie at this point. But as I look back on what I’ve written thus far, I see that each positive point drifts toward criticism or complaint. That’s a pretty good summation of how I think and feel. I think Muncie is an okay place—at least for someone in my position—but I don’t necessarily feel Muncie is doing well. It’s not so much a matter of weighing pros and cons. I can counterbalance every hopeful development—a perked-up downtown with some good restaurants and bars, a solid, fairly successful university, or impressive, socially beneficial nonprofit work—with a downer—ongoing political corruption, struggling schools, and stubbornly persistent poverty. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to benefit from and support the good things without suffering much personally from the problems. But the negatives are a drag on our sense of the place, a constant reminder of the city’s downward trajectory. It remains difficult to imagine Muncie as a broadly prosperous, successful community.
These doubts gain strength when I think about the history of Muncie and what it says about our ability to turn the place around. It became a city near the end of the nineteenth century mainly because it happened to be sitting on top of a massive reserve of natural gas. It helped to have ambitious business leaders and successful city builders, but gas was the necessary ingredient. It ran out fast, but it jumpstarted Muncie so that it could take advantage of the wider trend of industrialization. Now, more than a century later, there is no logic behind Muncie’s continued existence as a manufacturing center, not because of any local failure but because of bigger technological and political changes. We rely now on a university, a hospital, and on providing retail services to the region. In both instances, Muncie’s rise and decline resulted from factors mainly outside of the control of the people living here. I’m not saying what they did was insignificant, but larger structures mattered a lot. So even if we do everything right locally in response to our present predicament—and that is far from the case at the moment—there’s no guarantee the city can become a prosperous, equitable place. Bigger, broader changes may be necessary, and it’s not entirely within the power of the people living here to make them. I think a lot of people recognize this, if only dimly, and it feeds an uncertainty that makes optimism difficult to sustain.