This one will get around to the point eventually, but I hope you enjoy the getting’ there.

The grass was always the greenest green back then, and the sky an impossible blue – “azure” they would say now – with white, cotton-candy clouds, clean, sharp edges on them floating in the blue and you could almost reach up and grab them and bring them down in your hand.

Our meeting place was often a green power company box set on a concrete slab between properties. No one had fences in the suburbs where we lived and the lush backyards made a solid greenbelt behind the houses.

The power box was about three by three and two or three of us children could climb up on it or sometimes it was just me, laying on my back, looking up at that blue sky. The sun just warmed the power box just enough that it felt good on my back as I stared into the clouds.

The power box brought electricity to the houses or something. I don’t know. I’m not an engineer. But that’s what I thought back then. Electricity was supposed to be the big equalizer, and for a while it was.

For us, no one was rich or poor because everyone we knew had a single TV and it had three channels and we all watched the same shows in the evenings and there wasn’t an envy machine that had us chasing our tales. The families on the TV… the Bunkers (no relation,) the Jeffersons, the Bradys, even the Sanfords, they all lived in different socio-economic strata, but their lives were not altogether different. The Sanfords lived in a junk yard and the Ewings were supposed to be uber-rich outside of Dallas, but most of the differences were superficial. I don’t remember anyone – at least openly or vocally – saying they wanted to live like the Ewings. Most of us young people would probably have rather lived in a junkyard.

America, I think, was a vast middle class. Someone had a Big Wheel and someone had a bicycle and we lived in a cul-de-sac and played kickball together. I know there were poor people and there were rich people, but we all watched the same news and the same programs. My parents told us that they had been very poor (and it’s true) but now my father was in the military and they’d bought their first new house and we got to take a vacation in the summer.

America was the first home and incubator of the middle class, the first place where poor people could carve out some acreage and build a farm by hand and grow tobacco or cotton or some other crop, get a few animals, and live on their own terms. In most of the Old World, there was no “upward mobility.” You never would own land. If you were born into service, that was where you stayed. But here, by the mid-1800s, this was a land of the broadest and deepest middle class in the history of the world.

That’s not what this article is about. Not really. The point is that the Envy Machine wasn’t in full gear yet. It existed. Marketers and Advertisers were at work. Mad Men. But the Mad Men were selling toothpaste and Volkswagens not mansions and Kardashians.

But the poor began chasing the rich. Not the real things, but the trappings of wealth. So check this out. A quick aside… something you probably never thought of…

Dwellings were once made of stone or wood. That was basically it. Depending on how rich you were, you could afford a bigger or smaller dwelling, but the materials were basically the same. If you had a castle, you got bigger rocks, had them hand-formed and hewn. Bigger beams held up the ceiling.

But (and here’s how it starts) the rich people could afford to pay someone to come in and plaster the walls. Make them smooth and white. Fancy. The poor in their Lincoln log cabins or stone shacks didn’t have smooth walls. They just had rock or stone like Fred Flintstone. Until one day someone figured out that you could take horse poop and sand and some hay and lime and plaster your walls yourself. The poor man looked up and… WOW… he had rich-people-walls! Then the rich man said “Hmmm. Can’t have this. I’ll pay an artist to come in and paint the walls. Flowers and whatnot.” Then some poor man figured out he could create the same effect with a wood roller and dye made from plants. Then the rich man paid to have wood hewn and smoothed into thin boards. Expensive! He ran them vertically and not horizontally so you could see they were EXTRA. They weren’t just the boards holding up the house like the poor people had. By this time, someone invented dimensional lumber. And the poor man could cut down trees, haul them to the mill, and then he had nice walls too, but his boards had to run horizontally because they were structural. There was no plywood yet. So the rich man went back to plaster and painted decorations on his walls again. The poor man got plywood and discovered sheet rock and wallpaper. The rich man went back to vertical wood. The poor man discovered paneling (Did you wonder why the paneling in the 70s had vertical “wood” lines? It was so his walls would look “rich.”) The circle of life.

Not too many years ago we were invited to tear down an old house so we could keep the wood. As we tore down the walls, we could see the layers of history. Rip off the paneling and there was sheetrock and wallpaper. Behind that was lapboard, which is the stuff the Magnolia people on HGTV are pushing now.

We moved to Maryland because, like I said, my father was military. I remember it was the first time I actually knew some people who we considered “rich.” Our neighbors down the street. They had skateboards and a half-pipe skateboard ramp in the backyard. I wasn’t allowed to skateboard (too dangerous,) so I’d sit on the hill and watch them skate the half-pipe. The father collected cars. I remember the boys got BMX bikes. They showed us all the coolest, high-dollar bikes from magazines and their dad bought them the best of the best. These were the first off-road style bikes I’d ever seen. Knobby tires. I had one of those early ’70s bicycles you could get at Kmart. Banana seat. Sweeping “chopper” handlebars. They were cool once years earlier, but not after the BMX bikes came out. So, I found a 10-speed bike seat at the junkyard and replaced the banana seat. I saved up and bought BMX-style handlebars and knobby tires. It wasn’t a BMX but it looked like one from a distance. The poor chase the rich once the Envy Machine kicks in.

I remember when Nike shoes became the big thing. Everyone was getting white Nikes, but you had to have the leather ones and not the canvas ones. Before that, we all wore canvas Chuck Taylors. $3 at Kmart. But then came the leather Nikes. Had to be white, too. Non-white shoes would get you bullied and teased – no end. So, I begged my mom for white leather Nikes.

They have to be WHITE, LEATHER, NIKES.

NOPE. She said, “We can’t afford them. You outgrow them too fast. No way.” And she was right. But she came home with… get this… red, canvas Chuck Taylor LOW TOPS. Sure, they would be cool later in the 80s and into the 90s, but not in 1976 in the Washington D.C. area, my friend. Red canvas Chuck Taylors low tops was like wearing a sign that said “I’m poor so stuff me in a locker.”

But the point is that now, today, the Envy Machine is ubiquitous. That means it is everywhere all the time. It is in your right hand and in your forehead. You carry it and read your news and get your information from it. It tells you how to vote and what to wear and what things to say if you don’t want to get canceled. It pumps out memes and it trains brains.

It shapes the landscape. You drive down the highway and you pass little cardboard cutout communities interspersed with carbon-copy little shopping areas. Dollar General has all the Chinese stuff that looks just like the stuff rich people have. But if enough people get the newest iPhone, the prices will come down so everyone can have one. And even if the prices don’t come down, there will be an easy payment plan. And if you don’t want an iPhone, you can get an android version for way less money but you’ll still get bullied. I can’t tell the difference between the BMW sporty SUV and my Hyundai when they’re going down the road, except for the logo.

Plastic life.

Your small town wants to be like the rich-people-towns and the suburbs next to the big cities. Your local college wants to be like the big boys.

If you’re not careful, they’ll haul off your history and put up another Dollar General so you can buy fake Chinese knock-off copies of the stuff rich people have. They will tear down your history, or plaster over it to make it look like post-modern America. Behind that metal, if you pull it off, is the stone buildings stacked by pioneers.

You gotta be careful and pay attention because you’re carrying the Envy Machine and some people don’t sleep because they are busy creating content to make you want what the miserable people have. Their job is to make you want to destroy your own civilization. It’s not on their business cards, but that’s what they do.

If you keep your small-town character while still revitalizing, you can have a win-win.

So, be careful. K?

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.