Stories of violence in rural areas, like the recent account of shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, are always greeted with surprise and alarm. But such reactions, according to PNS commentator Evelyn Thornton, has more to do with our image of life outside urban areas than with the reality of the small-town world. Thornton was raised in rural Virginia and is on the staff of YO! (Youth Outlook), a newspaper by and about young people produced by Pacific News Service.

When I tell people I'm from the country, images of cows and home cooking pop into their heads. But the story from Arkansas, where kids were slaying other kids with hunting rifles, dashes the romanticism.

The question being hashed around and around is why is this happening? What happened to Walden? How can something like this happen where life is supposed to be slow and peaceful?

It happens because the slow, quiet pace of small towns is disappearing. I grew up on a farm, near a town -- or should I say near a subdivision near a town near another subdivision by another bigger town closer to the city by more subdivisions. When I was a kid, half those subdivisions weren't there -- and when I go home after three months away, there will probably be many more.

They are linked by fast-moving highways covered in fast food chains and other quick in-and-out shops. In this sprawl, the town is lost. Exchanges between people are fast and efficient, but they boil down to whether or not you want fries with your cheeseburger. Everyone is a unit, vacuum packed in plastic -- and a unit cannot be a community.

It used to be we would ride our bikes to "town" to Wasky's Mill, where we would sit and eat drippy ice cream cones and listen to all the old farmers tell each other about the dry corn crop or a new cow. Now a neon shiny "convenience Exxon" is in its place, selling Frozefruit. Not many kids make the trek -- and the farmers are disappearing, opening up more land to pre-made "country-style" box houses.

The death of the country community, where people interacted, directly affects kids trying to grow up in the wake of suburbia, as we saw in Arkansas. Children grow up without any sense that people are people. They are just TV figures who should just get back up after being shot, as they do on TV. Kids of this community-less generation eat plastic, drive in plastic, watch plastic. Without human interactions we begin to feel plastic and assume that others must be plastic too.

When I was 10, my parents put us through a "do it ourselves" phase. We grew all our own food, my mom made her own bread and butter from cows we hand-milked.

I hated it. The butter wasn't salty enough, the bread had wheat berries in it, and the jelly was all seeds. I craved fruit roll -- that plasticky fruit stuck to plastic film -- the other kids ate for lunch. We even killed our own turkey for Thanksgiving.

Now I look back and realize I was lucky to have that injection of reality. Actually eating what you have killed gives killing a very different meaning, gives a much deeper appreciation for life. Now I chide my parents for their lapses -- prod my mom about planting the garden and grimace at the boxes of snack foods in our cabinets. I wish my younger brother and sister had been old enough to appreciate those "reality injections."

It takes work and time to make a family life, and though we have many things designed to make our lives easier, we have less and less time as we race along the interstate, pull up at McDonalds, and finally crash in front of the TV set.

Even in my own family, soccer games and individual agendas have led to a more "plasticized" less personal life. We used to watch just Saturday morning cartoons, but my brother and sister now watch TV and movies whenever they aren't in a car or plastic booth.

I tell people I'm from the country, but the truth is that Walden no longer exists, and the scene is much more like a Stephen King horror film.