Drafts
Drafts
This page is meant to show my progress over the span of multiple months. The drafts, although rough, appear here for the purpose of improvement.
Class is the most essential aspect of any one person’s life. It is what defines them in their youth and what will define them in their adult life. My life, so far, has been dominated by a fickle guise of opulence protecting me and my brother from our very real economic insecurity. I truly praise my mom, a hard-working widow, for putting up the guise for as long as she could. But it has become more obvious that we are simply not wealthy. It’s weird for me to admit this because I never had to be conscious of my spending. Only now do I understand why my mom said no to some things and yes to other things. This recognition has also made it easier for me to come to terms with the fact that my whole future relies on my school performance. I will not get any second chances or bailouts from my mom. I need to do good in school for the betterment of myself and my whole family. I am the only one lucky enough to go to college. I am the only one lucky enough to go to college for free. If I spoil this opportunity, that’s it. All my parent’s hard work and my hard work in school will be wasted. Not only that, but I am also, apparently, the most fortunate in my entire family’s history. So, me being the first person in our entire family to go to college is the result of 300 years of economic turmoil. But the worst part about this is I don’t think that I understand how much of an accomplishment this is for my family. I want to feel like I worked off my own merits to get where I am, but it always goes back to “your Irish forefathers worked their butt off for you to be here! Be considerate”. I never met them in my life. And they surely have not met me! They could not have conceivably done this for me.
Another contributing factor to this is the fact I am the first of my family to be raised not in the NYC Metropolitan area. I am the first southerner in my family. In Myrtle Beach, unlike where I was born, it seems like you can live your entire life remote from the struggles of your community. I would argue that the community of Myrtle Beach is almost non-existent at this point. I don’t think they never had a community, but due to the lifeless gentrification and commercialization of the beachfront and its surrounding areas, it has become a tourist city in its most plain definition. There is no “Myrtle Beach-ian”, only a “local” or a “tourist”. That is the only connection between the people of this town. Up north, at least where I lived, there was a connection in our insignificance. We did not think of ourselves as an attraction or as a place that sought to be something it wasn’t. It was a place you tried to get out of due to its slow, rotting decay. But the feeling was omnipresent. Everyone wanted to leave. Everyone hated to commute to their job just to go home and do it again for the next 40 years. But through that mutual struggle, they stayed. They stayed because it was natural. It was authentic, lonely, America. Not this gawky tourist trap designed for the pleasure of those who couldn’t care less about us or our struggles. To them, we’re just the servers or the cooks or the “hicks”. They think of us as local idiots sitting on a pot of gold. Well, so be it.
The draft above is not very good. It is whiny and comes off like a teenager standing on a soapbox trying to sound fresh and rebellious but really sounds abnoxious. Although alot of the sentiments are ones I still believe, I eventually articulate them better.
When formulating my evidence for my opinion, I found it very difficult to find any local sources critiquing the status quo of the country and city governments. There are multiple reasons for this. General content with this predicament, the issue being somewhat left-wing in nature, and the majority of the county now being non-locals. But I think this issue is being purposely suppressed because it harms the tourism industry. Tourism is undoubtedly a major economic part of the county especially Myrtle Beach, yet none of the profit is going to the people of Myrtle Beach at all. Myrtle Beach still ranks high as one of the most violent cities to live in the US. And Myrtle Beach still has a humongous sex trafficking and kidnapping problem despite massive growth in the last 10 years supposedly ‘helping’ the locals. Drug use and arrests have been increasing as well, mostly in majority low-income and minority communities. Yet it seems that a high-end suburb is being built every few weeks to be sold to incoming Northerners who will eventually contribute nothing to society and die. So, to conclude this introduction, I will leave this with one thing. I find the situation in Myrtle Beach to be non-sustainable and will result in greater turmoil for the locals.
Gentrification & Neighborhood Housing Cycles: Will America’s Future Downtowns be Rich? ifo Institute for Economic Research.
Haynes, Jonathan. “Myrtle Beach Workers Have Longer Commute Due to Rising Housing Costs, Report Says.” MyHorryNews.com, 6 July 2021, https://www.myhorrynews.com/news/myrtle-beach-creating-more-workforce-housing-as-cost-of-living-increases/article_f39c8080-ac2f-11eb-ac14-7ba9872b3677.html.
“Suburbanization - Urban Sociology - Iresearchnet.” Sociology, 22 May 2018, http://sociology.iresearchnet.com/urban-sociology/suburbanization/.
Wilson, Reid, director. More Americans Are Moving, Mostly to Sun Belt Suburbs. The Hill, The Hill, 19 Apr. 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/439561-more-americans-are-moving-mostly-to-sun-belt-suburbs/. Accessed 30 Sept. 2022.
“Works Cited.docx - Works Cited Horry County, Imagine 2040. Https:/Www.horrycounty.org/Portals/0/Docs/Planningandzoning/imagine2040/Chapter 4 Natural: Course Hero.” Works Cited.docx - Works Cited Horry County, Imagine 2040. Https:/Www.horrycounty.org/Portals/0/Docs/Planningandzoning/Imagine2040/Chapter 4 Natural | Course Hero, https://www.coursehero.com/file/91196367/Works-Citeddocx/.
This draft is also poorly written and incredibly out of shape compared to the final Annotated Bibliography. Regardless, it serves as a preliminary introduction to my final one.