Recently my fair town has been getting some really bad press. Ok, maybe I should rephrase that. For the last 100 years, St. Louis has looked worse and worse, both in the press and in the flesh.

When the new “St. Louis - All Within Reach” slogan came out there were 10x as many people that wrote into the P-D making fun of it than actually commenting on the slogan or offering constructive criticism.

Truly, it has become a region-wide pastime to bash the place we live. Almost as synonymous with “STL” as t-ravs, red-capped hoosiers and Bud is the idea that we are inferior and downtrodden. How’s that for morale? I’m used to it by now, but the flood of stories that relect poorly on the greater St. Louis area just never subsides.

How about these doozies:

- 14-year-old chick hangs herself after being harassed on MySpace by disgruntled friend’s parents. Classic St. Charles white trash idiots here. Terrible story.

- St. Louis leads the U.S. in STD’s. Not the first time it’s been said either.

- St. Louis (St. George) cop goes ape shit on a kid for no reason. I was real happy to see how close this St. George was to where I live. I never even heard of the ‘town’. This actually was one instance in a parade of ‘cops being bad’ stories, tasering people and all that.

- St. Louis school district loses accreditation, and all that ‘hire a consulting firm to run the schools’ BS. Taken over by state. Guess I’ll be sending my kids to Webster or John Burroughs.

- St. Louis voted “Most Dangerous City in America“. I heard these stats are biased though because they don’t take into account houses with more than two television sets.

And all the other harsh realities about St. Louis city having the largest loss of population of an urban area in the history of the modern world, white flight/deseg/racism, losing those railroad contracts, Lambert losing TWA and 75% of it’s flights, not to mention that useless 2nd runway that forced thousands out of their homes, bad public transportation, and so on. Even the local 3rd baseman is talking shit about our manager. Travesty!

We have consistenly made poor decisions in civic planning, education, real estate development, city/county politics and in our relationships with our fellow residents. Sad really. It’s like you have to corner yourself in to the parts of town that you can enjoy and then close your eyes as you speed down the highway past all those that you’d rather just not know were there. That attitude is only fuel for the problem, but I have to admit I have it.

St. Louis - I want to love you but everyone is making it so hard. Well connected, remarkably centered and ‘all within reach’. Except pride.