It saddens me to admit that, from my visits back to my hometown, I have found enough of the remaining locals to be gripped with a particular mentality and related behavior that the culture itself had at some time reached a “critical mass” sufficient to be classifiable as dysfunctional, and thus highly toxic. The pathogen is by no means absent from the local businesses, government (and municipal organizations) schools (including colleges), hospitals (and medical clinics), and charities. The underlying mentality is nearly ubiquitous. I assume that finding a culturally-ensconced pathology’s core assumptions stated as explicitly as I witnessed at two local institutions is rare, and that such an opportunity for dissection ought not be lost, lest that and other such sordid cases be written off as necessarily lost in their own stools of firmament as the inhabitants effectively isolate their specific geographical area as “weird” or just plain different from the outside world in a seemingly inescapable downward spiral. Hence my dissection here of two main assumptions tacitly (and occasionally explicitly) shared by the infected souls in my rather hapless hometown.
