Going Home.

It’s not the same society; we’re not the same people.

“Going home.” Are there two English words with more power to move us? The source of that power, for good or ill, are the associations that overwhelm our consciousness whenever these two words are spoken.

Not all the associations are positive. For far too many of us “home” is not a happy memory. Far from being the warm and nurturing combination of parental love and reassuring architecture, the memories evoked are of pain and dislocation. Sometimes “going home” is the very last thing we want to do.

And that’s just our own home. Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown” captures the bitter reality of social, economic and political change that robs our hometown of all its familiar anchors – casting its inhabitants adrift on tides they cannot hope to control: