“You’ll go far,” a well-intentioned high school English teacher
once told me. Wouldn’t he be disappointed to learn that I am still
living a meager fifteen miles from my alma mater? No doubt he would
protest that he was using the word “far” not as a measure of
distance, but of achievement. But I am not so sure. As localist
author Bill Kauffman has noted countless times, in America to
achieve is to leave. And one’s success is often measured by the
distance one travels from home. For young Midwesterners that often
means lighting out for one of the big cities on the coasts.
And that is only the beginning of our hypermobility. Americans,
on average, move every
four years, whereas staid Europeans relocate on average twice
in their adult lives. All this transience cannot be good for
society. Try building ties, friendships, and deep connections when
you know not whether you are coming or going. When you settle down
in a community for the long haul, you are more likely to invest in
that place. You attend neighborhood association meetings. You join
garden clubs, the PTA, your church choir. It takes dedicated,
longtime residents to create lasting institutions like museums and
cultural centers. “The longer people stay in their homes and
communities, the more they identify with those places, and the
greater their commitment to helping local businesses and
institutions thrive,” says urban expert Joel Kotkin.
The American lust for movement has its proponents. Those who
favor rootlessness (oikophobes or home-haters, in
philosopher Roger Scruton’s phrase) like to say that America was
founded on the idea of movement, since many of our ancestors left
their homes and families to settle here. And, once here, many kept
right on tramping west as the country grew.
True enough, but isn’t the Great American Dream largely one of
oikophilia? And isn’t a home something more than a house you
inhabit briefly before relocating to the next city? What about
family, roots, and community? Don’t they play a role in the
American Dream as well?
You wouldn’t know it from the way we encourage our best and
brightest to “go far.” It is no wonder smart small-town kids can’t
wait to run off to college and begin their lives of vagabondage,
when parents, principals. and teachers — especially here in the
Midwest — actively encourage this, much to our own detriment and
that of our towns.
SIMILAR TO THE mobile “achievers”
are the “relos,” the rootless professional class, who follow the
money from suburb to suburb (“relovilles”) and put ego, career, and
money before the Ties that Bind. These are not the laid-off
blue-collars whose factories shut down and they have no choice but
to set out for the next boom town. These are executive gypsies
required to relocate every few years to remain on the upward career
track. Peter Kilborn, author of
Next Stop, Reloville, estimated the total relo
population at around four million in 2007.
Kilborn’s book made me think of a forty-something friend of mine
who recently sold his small company for more bread than I could
blow in a lifetime. Instead of enjoying the fruits of his success
with an early retirement amid his family and friends, he — and by
extension, his wife and young daughter — took another job hundreds
of miles away in Dallas.
If it is easy to move away, it is considerably harder to come
back. Returning home is regarded by many as a kind of defeat. When
the always homesick Bill Kauffman decided to move back to his
hometown of Batavia, New York, some years ago, the locals were
saddened and somewhat embarrassed for him. Poor guy couldn’t make
it in the real world.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy in all this is the effect of all
this rootlessness on parents and grandparents. I am always a bit
saddened by the slight of old couples schlepping through airports
on their way to Orlando or Denver or Dallas to visit their
grandchildren or to attend this or that graduation or wedding or
birthday party. Such is the price we pay for encouraging our
children to be successful somewhere else.
My own son will go away to college in the fall. Every parent
wants to see his child be successful. And I am no different. I just
hope he doesn’t take it the wrong way when I say I hope he doesn’t
go too far.
