We owe our home states
Caroline’s post on being from “flyover country” started an important conversation among those of us who do not come from either coast of the United States. As a proud citizen of Arizona (which is turning 100 years old on Valentine’s Day!), I have some thoughts of my own on being from “flyover country.”
When I consider those of us from the interior, a question comes to mind. It’s one that, when I ask many of my non-coastal friends, produces a lot of defensiveness and discomfort. That question is whether we owe anything to our home states, especially since many of us might feel as if our success is built upon our leaving them.
Perhaps it’s the word “owed,” but people get all in a tizzy at the prospect of having to give back to a community that helped raise them. But I think there’s a strong case for giving back—if not a moral imperative to do so.
The states we come from lose their brightest minds to places like Columbia. If a student can get out, he or she frequently does. You can’t blame them for doing so—too often the best education must be found out of state. However, this effect writ large produces a dangerous polarity of education in our country as the graduates of the top universities remain in cities like New York, leaving their home state behind permanently. As wealth accumulates on the coasts, the interior deteriorates.
I think we Columbians, as the people who have been given our state’s best resources and allowed to leave for our education, should take responsibility for this negative trend. Instead of taking our education and running with it for our own success, we need to consider how others helped us get to this point and how we can do the same for future generations. That may even mean moving back home—not because it is the most personally lucrative choice, but because it is what you do for a place that actually enabled your success.
You may argue that the community didn’t raise you and that you got here in spite of your community, but it’s my firm belief that even if that’s the case you should give back for the futures of kids like you who will have a better chance achieving success. We cannot deny the long term effects of abandonment on a state that invests in its children, only to have the most promising ones leave. If we do not take responsibility, who will?
Derek Turner is a senior majoring in Political Science and Anthropology. He enjoys the blanched faces people make when he tells them he’s voluntarily moving to downtown Detroit for two years after graduation.
To ask current students to give up opportunities by returning to their home states would be not only unfair to the students, but also the states that poured resources into their brightest so that the students ARE able to maximize achievement.
The focus on states on fosters a sense of sectionalism. We are all Americans, whether we come from Arizona, California, or New York. If one can benefit society more in a large metropolitan area on either coasts, it would be tragic, if not blatantly selfish, if the students to go back to their home states.
Understand pain, and you can usnerdtand how it can exist without actually causing emotional discomfort that came with the fall; it’s purely a warning mechanism, warning that we need to get away from something harmful.
A state is nothing but a geopolitical entity. For that matter, a country is nothing but a geopolitical entity. The idea that we have a “moral obligation” to some arbitrary part of the world is ludicrous. My parents grew up in China. Does that make them “morally obligated” to remain there? If they had followed such advice, I would never have gotten the opportunities in life that came from growing up in the US.
If a state or country wants to improve its economy, it will do so by creating the incentives that attract an intelligent, hard-working, and talented workforce to come to (or remain in) its boundaries, and not by some sense of moral guilt. You don’t owe a “community”, you owe the individuals who guided you and made you who you are today. Your parents, your teachers, your mentors. The best way to pay them back is to be as successful as you can be. That way, their sacrifices would have been worth it.
This was going to be a staff editorial, you thief!
Then again, I sort of stole your solitude idea, so fair’s fair.
Thanks for posting this, Derek. I think this is a very mature, responsible way of looking at things. All of us, as students at an elite university, have the responsibility to use it to contribute in some substantial way to society. For some of us, that will involve more sacrifice than others. While I don’t believe that all people ought to return to their hometowns, I think it’s necessary to at least think long and hard about it— to remember where you came from, how you got to where you are now, whom you ought to thank for it, and how you can use what you have to serve the community that helped shape who you are today, honoring those who came before us and helping guide those who are coming after us.
skhtpeasyaeemovie on February 23, 2011 if anybody has the names of the people in this clip, let us know we’re documentary filmmakers doing a film on the fear of public speaking and can’t find out who these people are!!