If you ask me, we’ve gotten a little too big for our britches in this country.

I’ve spent my entire professional life fighting for the small things in this world; small farmers and ranchers, small towns, small government and small business owners. As a champion of smallness, it pains me to say this, but I may have been fighting a losing battle.

In the town of my birth the local diner is now a McDonald’s and instead of buying a cup of coffee from someone I knew for a dime, it now costs over $5 from a stranger at Starbucks. The local grocery store where we used to shop has been replaced by two chain stores that are owned by the same humongous company. The nice man at my local bank that loaned me $300 to buy a show steer in high school has been replaced by a kiosk.

I’ve always been a small-town guy. I was born in a tiny hospital with only four beds. We got our news from a local newspaper. Parents bought extra copies and clipped out photos for their scrapbook whenever a child made the paper for playing football or winning an FFA speech contest. And the small0town folks knew what the initials in FFA stood for, too. I walked to school with my brother as early as the first grade and since we lived the furthest away from school, we’d pick up our friends along the way, and our parents never had to worry about lurking pedophiles.

Our Little League teams weren’t named the Yankees or Dodgers but were called things like Harding Furniture, Agri-Serv or Citizen’s Bank because every team was sponsored by a small business. And our parents in turn did business with them. I can’t remember a single team named Safeway or Bank of America.

Multi-generations of family members tended to stay put even in death and you could trace a family’s lineage by visiting their family cemetery plot. Kids played baseball in the streets, and the only graffiti were the chalk marks on the sidewalk where we played hopscotch. At the local airport you were always No. 1 for departure.

My grandpa, who was the most important person in my young life, owned a small furniture store and was chief of the volunteer fire department for decades, as was my great-grandfather before him. When the call came, he’d drop whatever he was doing and rush to the fire, even if he was close to closing a deal on a dining set that had been in inventory forever. I knew too, having dusted that same piece of furniture for years every Friday for which I got paid one shiny silver dollar.

My Democrat father was an independent trucker and my Republican mom was a professional seamstress, but although they had hellacious fights about everything else, I can never remember them fighting about politics one time. It was just something you didn’t talk about. The same applied to whatever religion you were. Folks didn’t fight about it or hate you because you were a Methodist, a Catholic or Jewish.

We grew avocados and lemons on our small acre of ground and sold them to Mitch’s Market. The produce hadn’t been shipped long distances nor was it grown in Mexico. The chilis weren’t from Chile. Our milk came from a local dairy and was delivered every morning right to our front door. I can’t remember anyone dying from salmonella, E. coli or cyclospora.

Important politicians never came to our town but the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile did once and all the kids came out to see it and get a free whistle in the shape of a weiner. My grandma played the piano every Monday for the charitable Rotary Club and the Lions Club and Kiwanis members drove their pickups every year for the FFA Roadside Cleanup. There was a sign at the city limits that bragged we were the Citrus Capital of the World, and we celebrated the Lemon Festival and the annual rodeo that my grandpa started with the Junior Jaycees. There’s a park there now with three ballfields where the rodeo grounds were that now bears his name.

We didn’t have Facebook friends but real ones who’d bring a casserole when a loved one died. We weren’t a community of strangers and everyone knew where all the kids and dogs belonged.