Fitchburg, Massachusetts is a dangerous city.
Is it now? Is it really?
I’ve lived in this city for almost a year now, and I wonder, well, why? How? Says who?
Yes, there is violence. Yes, people die here, it happens everywhere. It is bound to happen when there are 15,000 of us in a teeny, tiny space.
So I beg the question, how dangerous is it?
I am not a scholar. I am not a “studied reporter”. I am a supposed-senior at Fitchburg State University, living with her cat and the super-boyfriend. I have an unstable roommate situation. I have loans worth more than my mother’s car. I take six classes, and work two jobs to pay the bills. Yeah, I’m your typical ‘college kid’. It does not mean I’m blind, that I am somehow seperated from the world around me.
I’ve been moved around a lot. I was born in Massachusetts, shipped off to a suburb of southern Texas, and then moved back up here to a rural cow town far west of here. With a healthy population of coyotes, black bears, and the occasional mountain lion on my mother’s road, it can be dangerous in its own right. What the hell am I doing in Fitchburg? An unfortunate series of events, to put it mildly. I was denied housing by the university, FASFA really needs a system overhaul, and car insurance is too freaking expensive for this starving Professional Writing Major to afford. Thus I find myself in my “quirky” 2nd floor apartment of a 1920’s house. Love the place, hate my neighbors; I feel like this kind of thing probably happens far too often.
I am not blind, but I feel as though many of my fellow Fitchburgians are. They consume the news on the latest car accident, the latest arrest, and don’t even to get outside and experience it for themselves. Yes, there are dangerous elements to this city, as there are anywhere you live. But there’s a lot of good here too. There are volunteers who better this little place, and a shop owner who keeps a frequently decorate stuffed emu in her store.
That is what this blog will be about, the good, the bad, the gritty; the state of Fitchburg as I see it. I live here, I work here, and strangely enough, I kinda like it here.
Perhaps after reading this, you’ll kinda like it too.
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