stuck in a middle that I can't get out of

Sorry U2, I had to rip you off for a moment.
Here goes, we leave The Republic (which now threatens secession, per the governor but that's a whole 'nother post) and head to the 'I' state in the middle to see the inlaws for Easter. Yay us, a 12 hour trip with a 2.5 year old. This was my first venture through the middle states of O, K, N and I'm still a little traumatized. So here's the deal, I'm a west coast girl and honestly I think I've lived in areas with pretty good looking people (there's always that exception) some more than others but I didn't feel surrounded by ugly. This I've found is not true everywhere. While driving through K (my apologies to the residents of the Wheat/Sunflower/Jayhawk State) I was disappointed, I mean this is "nations heartland" why is it so ugly? And further more, there seems to be an abundance of not-so-pretty people. What happened?

This leads to a question, are we truly a product of our surroundings? I had a friend who once said she couldn't live in the Golden State because "she wasn't pretty enough" and she was no ugly girl mind you. But I kind of agreed with her and more than once made the joke that the husband and I snuck under the beauty radar when we landed in America's Finest City.

But back to my question, so if your born in a not so pretty part of this country are you doomed? I want to think not, Hollywood seems to be a melting pot of folks from all over this place. Really I guess what I wonder, is it that are we that easily effected by our surroundings that we start to look different when we move beyond our 'native place'? And even more do we act different? Do we so easily loose who we are/were? (I think these questions weigh on me more that I have a little person and I don't love The Republic I live in and I want to offer him a broad world view, which is hard to do here.) Can we keep the thing that makes who we are even if we are geographically transient?

Who knows, maybe change is good... (but for the time being I'm still resisting)