16 November 2009

Bill Kauffman reviewing Hollowing Out the Middle for The Wall Street Journal:

The middle of America, so long treated with mirth, mockery and mawkish condescension by coastal smarties, is shrinking. “The Heartland’s most valuable export,” write husband and wife sociologists Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, is not “crops or hogs but its educated young people.” This migration has devastating effects. From North Dakota to upstate New York, a youthful exodus is “hollowing out many of the nation’s small towns and rural communities.”

The article ends with this worthwhile thought, surely extracted from the book:

The solution to rural depopulation begins in relearning the value of that simple and underrated word: stay.

The irony in this, for me, is that I wouldn’t mind to leave Louisville; I wouldn’t mind to not stay. Of course, Louisville is not rural, and my family is not from here, but I’ve nonetheless known it as home for the last several years. But still I wouldn’t mind to leave here and plant myself elsewhere. It could be something borne in me. My family is from California. But now we also live here in Kentucky, and in Alaska, Tennessee, Missouri, Texas, and Oregon.

I also wouldn’t mind staying. But I might also like to try staying somewhere else. And I’m eager to read this book.

(via Maximus)