From my classroom window, I could see the construction of a new city skyline. As the new buildings went up, forever changing the farmland I’ve known my whole life. I could feel the world I once knew crumbling down. Highway eighty-six, the road I lived on the first ten years of my life and have traveled down nearly every day, was becoming unrecognizable. 

Progress, they said. Progress? Progress that was tearing down the houses that had been there longer than my grandfather had been alive. Progress is bringing thousands of new people to our small town, eating alive the interpersonal relationships we’ve shared with our neighbors since birth. 

It’s good for the community, they said. Good for our economy. The economy that school has barely taught us about, other than that it would be impossible for us to rise up in. Other than that we’re destined to be here forever. They’ve stopped having hope for us, the youth. The new working class is nothing but a number in a factory ready to be replaced at any given moment. They’ve given up hope that we’ll be anything more than a staple in the assembly line that fuels upper-class America. 

Writers like me, dreamers like me, will go nowhere—just a hobby of someone with no time to partake in such silly things. Time is money after all. Money that goes straight to bills, living paycheck to paycheck. Money that we base our soul worth on. Progress. All in the name of progress.