A Local Graduation: How Small Towns Can Come Back
6th October 2008
Towns not on interstates cannot make it we are told, towns that are not hip and exciting are dead. And so, our young people leave — with at least a casual observance that those left behind are falling to the drug culture. In a recent focus group of young males in one eastern Kentucky town one participant stated, “Sure I sell drugs — it’s easy money and I don’t have the connections to get a job even at Wal-Mart.”
A lot of it, I think, is convenient transportation. In the Good Old Days, it was difficult to move, so people stayed put. Nowadays it’s easy to move, so people staying put is surprising. I was born in one town in Indiana, and my parents moved us to another when I was too young to remember. I stayed in that town until I was 9, then my parents moved us back close to where I was born, where we stayed until I joined the Navy. I was therefore on the leading edge of the “let’s move if it might be better over there” trend. it never even occurred to me that I might stay in the small town (45,000) where I went to high school. I suspect that people just don’t have that expectation any more. Our communities are not where we live but those we share interests with through politics or hobbies or other connections — I’m closer to people I went to college with 20 years ago than whoever it is that lives next door to the house I’ve been in for the last 10 years, whom I’ve never met.