Mark A. Signorelli has an interesting piece up over at
Front Porch Republic on the theme of going home.
Several writers associated with FPR (Rod Dreher, Bill Kauffman,
among others) have written extensively about their journeys from
small town to big city and back again, where they had to convince
smug townsfolk that, no, they were not slinking back home having
failed to make it in the big city. Rather, they had chosen to trade
wealth and status for the pleasures of small town life.
Going home, however, is a luxury not everyone can afford. One
must have a hometown worth returning to, one that hasn’t been
changed for the worse by time and circumstance. Certainly, if one
has managed to escape the ghetto, the trailer park, even
Signorelli’s sprawling soulless suburbia, it unwise to go home
again. Not all of us hail from Kauffman’s beloved Batavia or
Dreher’s quaint St. Francisville.
As the wife and I continue house shopping, we have had many of
the same thoughts as Signorelli. I am unlikely to move back home,
even though home is but a short drive away. As Signorelli notes,
going home narratives “underestimate the extent of the cultural
wreckage wrought upon our communities… they overestimate the amount
of genuine civil society remaining in our local communities…”
Home, in other words, ain’t what it used to be. My hometown
certainly isn’t. The Belleville, Illinois of my youth was far from
idyllic; rather it was an ordinary working class town, with very
little charm, but a good deal of local industry. The nearby Stag
Brewery employed several generations of my neighbors. The schools
worked. Families were largely intact. Serious crime was a rarity.
My parents had no problem letting their preteen children sleep on
the front porch or in a backyard tent. We walked ourselves to
school and rode our bikes to baseball practice.
All that changed in the 1980s. The brewery was sold and
shuttered. The mall in a neighboring town doomed our downtown.
Soon, we were no more than a bedroom community serving nearby St.
Louis. Then the prosperous commuters began to drift away to new
housing tracts in the surrounding countryside. Housing prices
plummeted. As ethnic diversity increased (and economic diversity
decreased) racial tensions rose. The schools suffered from the
cultural gap, including the loss of competent teachers and the loss
of a strong tax base. The Catholic schools and churches began
consolidating and closing.
This is how towns die.
ALL OF WHICH BEGS the question: when is one’s hometown no longer
one’s hometown? Writes Signorelli:
The town where I grew up has been utterly transformed over the
years into a place embodying all of the destructive and inhuman
tendencies of modern American life…the atomization of our
neighborhoods; the crassness and destructiveness of our greed; our
lack of stewardship towards the natural world; our obliviousness
towards our intellectual heritage; the rancid divisiveness of our
politics; the frivolity of modern American religion. My
hometown is an absolute epitome of everything a Porcher loathes
about contemporary America, a veritable minor kingdom of economic,
cultural, and theological individualism. So as someone who
loathes these things as much as the next Porcher, I must simply say
that I have no place to return to. To return to my hometown, to
settle down there and raise a family, would represent, to my mind,
an act of surrender; it would subject me and my family to all of
the malign forces in our culture I wish to defy.
Signorelli is perhaps too gloomy about our present situation.
“We are unlikely to find a real home at this time, perhaps even in
our lifetimes,” he writes. Well, the author is a playwright and
used to ramping up the melodrama, so he is forgiven. But he lost me
completely when he avers that we are only at home when we live and
work among people who are our mirror image, who possess the same
world-view, same tastes, same affections, same ambitions, same
goals. Isn’t he describing the dull suburban conformity he longed
to escape?
I, too, am one who feels that Americans are too placeless, too
hypermobile, and that if we genuinely believe community and family
are fundamental we need to become more rooted. I am, however, more
optimistic about the future. I believe it is still possible to
“find a real home.” Especially if one is not seeking perfection.
Just a place with a strong sense of community, of law and order, of
walkable neighborhoods, good schools, some greenspace. If my
hometown no longer affords that then it is no longer home. And it’s
time to find a new one.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
