Steve Sailer writes: Dr. Matt emphasizes that contemporary Americans are more stiff upper lip. Our culture doesn’t like people complaining about being homesick. For example, we emphasize to 17 year olds that they are supposed to go off to a distant college next year and live amongst strangers. Only losers go to local colleges.
Not surprisingly, lots of college freshman get depressed, but we’re not supposed to use the word “homesick” in describing them.
* Whenever I read history books on topics from 19th century and earlier that quotes personal correspondence, I’m frequently struck by the perfervid emotions routinely expressed between people who are not lovers.
* What is lost when emigrants leave their homes is unfortunately usually neglected when considering migration policy. They don’t only leave behind family, friends and community, shredding human ties and social capital in the process, they’re scarred in the process and probably doomed to never really arriving in high-trust communities where people are committed to the communities and willing to invest in their welfare.
Perhaps America’s most noteworthy freedom is the freedom from duty and obligation that its citizens feel. After leaving everything and everybody behind… so many times… uprooting for emigration, pioneering along the American frontier or relocation to chase modern ambitions of career and cosmopolitan experience, market services have liberated us Yanks to follow our bliss . instead of relying on family or neighbors in the community. The latest iteration of the dot.com fad to enable strangers to transact to provide a lift across town or a place to crash when travelling is a logical market development and probably not the last one in this line. Americans have taken reinventing ourselves to the extreme of the notion that “city air makes you free.”
At what cost came this mobility and freedom? Mr. Sailer’s grandmother in law asks an important question we should consider when reflecting on what to make of the American experience. There is no doubt about the allure of social mobility that “streets paved with gold” promised. But hardship and disappointment for so many was often more the reality than the promised fantasy. Finally I wonder if the unnatural selection that sent America the most restless unattached dreamers might be an unexamined curse?
Frequently I’m confronted with evidence of this unkind notion, “Americans don’t solve problems, we leave them behind…” Every article or report I see, “America’s best places….” “Retire here, not there…” makes me believe that so many Americans are mere “consumers” of their home community. Rather than investing and contributing their love and time to make whatever their home is better, they’re all too ready to pick up and move to whatever place looks to provide a more agreeable turnkey experience, eg. offer the greener grass, milder weather, lower tax burden, better school district, exciting bohemian lifestyle, etc. Not that I can blame them at all. I recognize this all-too-American instinct and restlessness in myself. Perhaps I’m projecting this a bit too much on my fellow citizens?
I don’t think so.
A couple weeks ago I flew back east to visit a brother who had just moved there. His new home is a few hours from the town where I (mostly) grew up and went to school. On a lark we drove down there after I hadn’t been there since I left home 20 years previously. It’s uncanny how a place I knew so well could completely empty out of everybody I knew in a few short years. I recall all the kids in school who couldn’t wait to leave… out of state… as far away if possible. Now not only are all the kids gone, the empty nester parents have left too. They only settled in the town because of the excellent schools. But once the kids were done, it was time to leave for someplace without the ridiculous tax burden necessary to finance those good schools. A peculiar unsustainable pattern follows, but not quite like with salmon, who leave the streams for the big ocean. In this case the salmon don’t much care to return to the same exact stream to spawn. Any ol’ stream will do. Whatever freedom and mobility our lifestyles have given us, I might agree with Mr. Sailer’s grandmother in law, “God damn Christopher Columbus.” For the immigrants lost a community, continuity and loyalty that as their descendants we’ve never known.
* A sad story is that of Eric Carle, the artist/children’s book author (“The Very Hungry Caterpillar”). He was born in upstate NY of German immigrant parents. In ’35 when he was 6 and a perfect little American 1st grader, grandma wrote a letter saying, “Alles ist gut!” back in the Fatherland – that Hitler fellow had made Germany great again. America was Depressed, mom was homesick, so they went back. When the war started, dad got drafted into the Wehrmacht and ended up a Russian prisoner – they didn’t send him back until ’47, at which point he was broken physically and mentally (my own grandfather was never the same after his time in the Gulag). They sent Eric out to dig trenches. As soon as he could, he went back to the US (he was a birthright citizen) but he still speaks with a German accent. I think the whole thing made him completely allergic to politics so he writes sweet childrens stories about worms and bears that don’t even have an allegorical meaning.
The same thing happened to my wife’s father’s cousin and family except they went back to Stalinist Russia in ’36 and the ones that survived didn’t get out until perestroika 50 years later.
