Are you reading the national news, worried about the direction that our country is headed in? Me, too. But I’ve had a number of conversations with friends who are living in other places in the country and I think we’re pretty lucky.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that bad things aren’t going to happen, or that we will be spared in the chaos. But what I am saying is we should appreciate what a good place western Massachusetts is to be in right now. We could be a model for the way forward.

Though not a Greenfield native, I’ve been here for about 28 years. Before that I lived in Florida. That’s where I went to high school and college. I have friends who still live in Florida, and friends who have scattered across the country.

Recently, I was on a video chat with these friends. One of them has apparently started to binge watch all of the movies and shows he can find on Netflix about small towns. The guys started joking around about finding some small town in America where we could all move. One guy is tired of his job, another is retired, another just had his father and ex-wife die and the idea of a new start appealed to him.

They complained about feeling socially isolated and liked the idea of living in the same place again, like we did when we were in high school.

I said, “I live in such a town.”

I mean, think about it. My Floridian friends live in housing complexes where the sidewalks end at the subdivision line. They live on an exit on the highway. The local coffee shop is in a strip mall. Their houses are nice-looking — they bought them from a builder, so they got to choose their house like you would click through options in an online catalog — but they don’t know their neighbors.

I can see the Poet’s Seat Tower out my front door. I could walk on a sidewalk all the way into town, and to a grocery store and a coffee shop. I wave at the woman who lives across the street when she walks by; she always brings treats in her pockets to feed the dogs that walk in our neighborhood, and my dog has a Pavlovian response every time she sees her.

This past Sunday, I paused for a moment. My daughter, an independent spirit, was serving as an acolyte at church and I saw her with her robe on and a little rainbow cross pinned to her stole, and I thought to myself: This wouldn’t happen just anywhere. She might not feel at home in a church in many other parts of the country right now.

At a poetry reading in Shelburne Falls, I talked to a guy I knew from graduate school who is living in rural Connecticut right now. He said it’s not like the valley at all. The town he lives in is isolated and went for Trump in the last election.

He used to live in Turners Falls and he said he was surprised at how vibrant Greenfield and Turners Falls look right now, how artsy and optimistic they are. I said that I remembered, 20-odd years ago, writing about the “big issue” in Greenfield, which was the issue of Walmart, and that the anti-Walmart crowd, as vilified as they were at times in the debate, ended up winning.

And we live now in the city that they envisioned, one with a vibrant and active downtown with independent shops.

I’m well aware that we live in a bubble, and that even people reading this column might not agree with me on how I characterize western Mass. But as a Recorder reader, you should also realize how lucky you are to be in a city of 20,000 residents that has an actual newspaper that publishes six days a week and does real local reporting about issues in the place where you live.

Pick any town in any other state outside of New England at random and I’ll give you 10-1 odds that town doesn’t have a newspaper like that.

Not only that, but we’re not a suburb. We’re not a college town. We’re an honest-to-goodness rural place where you can buy eggs from a local farmer, and sweet corn, and kale. We can actually be caught behind a tractor on our way to work. Sure, I might complain about it in the moment, but my Floridian friends have no idea what our life is like.

To them, it looks like a Netflix movie.

Andrew Varnon works in the special education program at Frontier Regional School. He lives in Greenfield with his family.