Walsh was responding to Ben Shapiro's idea that young men should move away from their home town if that's what it takes to succeed economically:
I'm giving you written transcript even though Walsh's manner of speaking does not transcribe well: "As a parent, I want my sons... if they have to... to move out and.... My daughters, I would love for them to just stay home with me until they get married many, many, many years in the future. So I do think there's like a gender element to it, but that, that's a separate thing. I think if I, I totally agree that if you're in a spot, particularly if you're a young man and you can't afford anything, you... can go anywhere and do anything and you can take risks.... However, at the same time, it's also true that you shouldn't have to do that. Like, something is wrong that so many people have to do that.... If you're a young man and you're looking at, okay, well my, my parents were born here, they lived here, my grandparents lived here. Maybe my great grandparents lived here. So generations of a family lived in the same place and now all of a sudden... everything's broken down and it doesn't work for me to live in this town anymore. Something is wrong, something is broken, it should not be this way. We need to fix it. So, but on the practical level... you might have to go somewhere else, hopefully with the intent of eventually coming back to live around your family.... Move around, yeah. End up back with your family. So you might have to do that practically. You shouldn't have to. It shouldn't be that way.... And so we need policies in place that make it possible for people to live with their family and then move next door and stay with generations of families their entire life. You should be able to do that in a functioning and thriving society...."
I'm giving you written transcript even though Walsh's manner of speaking does not transcribe well: "As a parent, I want my sons... if they have to... to move out and.... My daughters, I would love for them to just stay home with me until they get married many, many, many years in the future. So I do think there's like a gender element to it, but that, that's a separate thing. I think if I, I totally agree that if you're in a spot, particularly if you're a young man and you can't afford anything, you... can go anywhere and do anything and you can take risks.... However, at the same time, it's also true that you shouldn't have to do that. Like, something is wrong that so many people have to do that.... If you're a young man and you're looking at, okay, well my, my parents were born here, they lived here, my grandparents lived here. Maybe my great grandparents lived here. So generations of a family lived in the same place and now all of a sudden... everything's broken down and it doesn't work for me to live in this town anymore. Something is wrong, something is broken, it should not be this way. We need to fix it. So, but on the practical level... you might have to go somewhere else, hopefully with the intent of eventually coming back to live around your family.... Move around, yeah. End up back with your family. So you might have to do that practically. You shouldn't have to. It shouldn't be that way.... And so we need policies in place that make it possible for people to live with their family and then move next door and stay with generations of families their entire life. You should be able to do that in a functioning and thriving society...."
When family live nearby, you can have many casual encounters. If they live across the country, you can travel to see them, but then it's a big trip. There are long gaps where you don't see them at all. When you do get together, how will that work? Are you going to hang out together? The parent/child relationship isn't about hanging out. The distances hurt! They're destructive of the extended family.
Posts
50 comments:
It's already possible to stay in the same place, and a great many people do. You might not make as much money; it's a trade-off. Having the government try to abolish trade-offs always ends badly.
Victor Davis Hanson has a podcast where he is interviewed and he goes into depth about the family being together and then broken up because (some) government policies destroy the viability of a town that has existed for over a century. He relates his history and that of his family farm which he still manages. On YouTube as "A Classicist Farmer: The Life and Times of Victor Davis Hanson"
The hero in the Hallmark Christmas movie is always a guy who stayed in the old home town.
A young man needs to leave mamma and go out into the world on an adventure, even if a small one. Then after wandering, they may return, to find it a very different place. They become their own person, not a dependent.
When are you gonna come down?
When are you going to land?
I should have stayed on the farm
I should have listened to my old man...
So goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You can't plant me in your penthouse
I'm goin' back to my plough
Back to the howlin' old owl in the woods
Huntin' the horny-back toad
Oh, I've finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road
Incorporation with remote offices and work from home options.
“ Huntin' the horny-back toad”
Ahhd likes tuh git me wuuna them thar hornyback toad licenses. John Kerry.
Comes across as an acceptable form of mom-attachment.
Most of these guys havent got the depth, in culture and time, to discuss this. In our (Basque) culture moving far away to seek ones fortune is a tradition hundreds of years old. Or older. Generally younger sons would leave, as Basque inheritance traditions usually leave nothing for them. If they make fortunes while far away, they sometimes return, to leave a mark on their hometowns. In every Basque village there are some "casas de Indias", houses of the indies, built by a fortunate son, usually from the 19th-20th century. I didnt realize quite how old this was until I visited Bergara, where there are some of these, well, palaces, built by fortunate sons of the 15th-17th centuries.
So it goes. Our people go to sea, go abroad, some (like my two great-uncles) go to America to be shepherds, like my grandfather who went to British Malaya to run rubber plantations.
All this is not unique to the Basques, its just that inheritance thing that has made it so visible there. In the rest of Europe kids were driven from home by slower but perhaps uglier processes, of escalating poverty.
Matt Walsh is asking for a sort of stability that has never existed.
In my life, it’s mostly been the other way around. The kids haven’t moved off to new horizons: the parents have. My parents moved to other side of the country when I and my sister were in college. After we started our own careers back where we grew up and it became clear we weren’t going to relocate, they came back. My maternal grandparents did the same thing, more or less, though my mother and her siblings were adults and at that point spread around the country when Grandma and Grandpa made their move.
My in-laws recently left their hometown and moved about five hours away. One kid remains “back home.”
Here's an idea: "As a new way to live in America it has been suggested that we build our factories in rural areas, away from cities, and run them on part-time jobs. Under this arrangement the man and the woman would each work 6 ours a day, 3 days a week. The would have enough spare time to build their own house, have a garden, and for hobbies and other outside interests."
Half a century ago forty percent of the American public said they would like to live this way, with another twenty-five percent indicating possible interest. How many would feel the same way today? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW.
A long-time mayor of a Westchester, NY city had 8 children, all of whom as adults lived within a 7-iron shot of his house. They were a close and interesting family. I admired him very much and envied his daily proximity to his kids.
- Krumhorn
Most of us are the grandchildren of wanderers. Even if your family's been here 400 years, it most likely has not stayed in the same place - blacks and hillbillies had the Great Migration, other Anglos kept moving west. Even the indigenous have moved around a lot in the last 150 or so years - sometimes forced to, sometimes not.
So having more than 3 generations in the same place has not been the American reality. Good? Bad? Indifferent? Arguments for each, but it just doesn't happen very much. CC, JSM
Whole lotta stupid in there. ‘Policies in place that make it possible’ equals more intervention from government, more treasury money wasted on stupid ideas.
You should be able to do that in a functioning and thriving society...
Gee, we had that -- for multiple generations. Perhaps something changed?
Perhaps something important could be restored?
I guess we'll never know...
make it possible for people to live with their family and then move next door and stay
Yes, but how can you square that when the dream is to move to NYC, declare your non-heterosexuality, and blame your problems on your "religious upbringing" and "racist" uncles.
cross subsidies are the fable of the button in the box- push the button and you get the thing but someone else is hurt. You get your thing. someone else is hurt, then we reset the button and give the box to ‘someone else’..
I moved away from my home town for my career, and have lived in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area because that’s where the best jobs in my field are. The rest of my family stayed put in the midwestern rust belt of my youth. Moving away was the best decision I made, I am better off than my siblings from both a financial and experience standpoint. My Dad complained to me about moving away, and I told him that he couldn’t push me to get the most and best education that I could and then expect me to waste it all by living in an area where I couldn’t get a job that utilized the skills I spent so much time and money acquiring.
My great grandfather was a younger son in what is now Northern Ireland. His big brother inherited everything, as was the rule in Protestant Ireland, so he had to leave or starve. He moved to southern Ontario, from which all five of his kids left for greater opportunity in the US.
In terms of doing the right thing to preserve historic family relationships, Iran says that it must shut down and abandon overpopulated Tehran because of water problems. Land is sinking 30 centimeters per year (although "per day" was also mentioned) as water sources dry up. However, President Masoud Pezeshkian said, “We can bring water from the Persian Gulf, but it will be costly."
However, the cost would be negligible compared to relocating the capital to Makran on the southern coast, which would likely take a century to accomplish.
As for affordability, redirecting funds now used to conduct the ongoing war against the Israelis and to build a nuclear arsenal would likely ease the economic pain of bringing in Persian Gulf water.
Matt Walsh is asking for a sort of stability that has never existed.
Certainly not in the last, what, half millennium or so, for most. Worse still is the "one worker in the family should be enough" idea, describing a phenomenon that pertained only in the US and only for like thirty years.
But my husband who in his family is a member of the ONLY generation in which no one* moved away, still pines for this for us and our kids.
* His grandparents relocated from New England and Montana, when his mom's generation was adolescent. His mom and one of her brothers stayed in Southern California from thenceforth; the other three siblings moved. My husband has one brother who stayed in Southern California except for a few years in northern, then returned. So even in my husband's generation, they haven't been stable - my husband moved away. But for a time in his childhood, both sets of his grandparents lived in the town he grew up in and he attaches great significance to those years. Oh, and he has a set of cousins who really are that sedentary - only one of the grandchild generation lives outside southern California.
Neighbor on one side has one kid still living at home, pursuing Masters, and 2 more living with about 1½ hours drive. Not yet married, but getting there, and they come home about every other weekend. Neighbor on the other side, with 3 young kids, has one set of parents here in the same neighborhood, the other about 1½ hours drive, who they go to frequently. Family is big in this region. Ours is about a 3 hour drive, but we see each other more than once a month. For the Hispanic populations, multi-generational and extended family interaction is more commonplace. For our friends from 2nd, 3rd generation German/Czech, they're mostly farming families and are generally closer knit, again, extended and multi-generational. I don't think Walsh is uncovering new ground. Families being important is not a new concept. It all starts with trust, and that's something that is learned when you're young, and if you're lucky, it's constantly ratified by family interactions. Family being a Mother and a Father and Grandparents taking an interest and showing devotion. The government could indirectly incentivize this if they chose to - but they choose to incentivize other, more toxic behaviors that seem, curiously, to increase dependence on government.
Matt Walsh longs for middle ages when peasants belonged to the land.
Matt Walsh still works for the daily wire, so he cant disagree with his boss, Ben Shapiro, that society shouldn't help you live where you grew up. If "Muh free market" says you need to move 3000 miles away to earn a living, well that's the way it should be.
Of course, in a real society, you'd be giving people the choice. In reality, of course, if you want to do certain work like be a lawyer or an engineer, you probably aren't going to be able to do that in a small town. That's why people moved off the farm, went to college, and ended up in fairly large sized city.
But the crisis is affordability. Lots of young people have to move. Or live with their parents till they're 40. That's not America. That's Ben Shapiro's america.
My grandparents on my fathers side lived next door to my great grandparents in Detroit. My maternal grandparents lived just a few blocks away from there. My mom and dad, literally lived a few blocs apart before they met. It blows me away every time I think about it. Now, we are all still within several miles of each other, though once my 93yo father passes, people will probably start to scatter. No one lives in Detroit. Everyone left in the late 60's.
Dumbo 'muricans cant understand the connection between increasing the population through mass migration by 50 million and housing affordability. Or between affordability and letting foreigners and hedge funds like Blackrock snap up private homes.
So, you get boob bait like "50 year mortgages" or some sort of loan guarantees. No review of the underlying problem. Just like college education cost. No review as to why its so expensive, just "hey, we need to give people the money".
Based on my family the history of the United States was predicated upon families moving to areas with increased opportunity. The main branches of my family started at Plymouth and West Virginia. Then as the successive generations become adults they moved. Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and finally California.
Maybe prosperous/more financially successful families didn’t have to do this. But for the majority of us hoi polloi that’s what you did to survive.
This is what current day immigrants are doing. Unfortunately, there is a large percentage that don’t want to follow the rules and jump the line (which makes it take longer for the rule followers). I can look back through the years and see the names of my family members on the ship’s passengers lists when they immigrated.
My grandparents were forced to immigrate to a midwestern rust belt city when they came to America because at that time that was where jobs were and where they were needed. Today there isn’t much going on there economically. Why should I stay there just because nearly 100 years ago some government bureaucrats placed my grandparents there?
My paternal grandparents made the leap (separately, they met here) from northern Germany to the USA in the years before the Great War. She came to work for an uncle in the hair-goods business, and he was working for a touring Italian opera company that went broke in Memphis.
Neither of their short-lived children left town, except for military service (my father) and finishing/secretarial school in NYC (his little sister). My father was chief accountant at a small cotton brokerage, and used to spend his lunch hour doing the books at their beauty shop in the Peabody.
If my father had lived I'm pretty sure we would have moved to Germantown or Collierville in the 70s, like most of my neighborhood friends' families. Farther east, at a minimum.
TBC . . .
Both of my siblings moved out and away immediately after high school or college (away at college, but not very far, for the school year) leaving the parents in the old home town. None of us ever moved back; I ended up on the west coast (grad school), the other two eventually settled on the east coast about 20 minutes from one another. The parents were rather matrilocal: Dad settled far away from his birthplace very close to where mom grew up.
The Spousal Unit was the opposite: they all generally live near one another and she was sort of shamed when we relocated 1500 miles away.
To me it feels like whatever you grew up with, that's what you do, for the most part. Personal psychology aside, of course. I'm kind of a loner in the first place.
If Trump's 50-year mortgages take off the kids will be fighting over who gets to move in and take over mom and dad's loan. More incentive to stay close to home and eat cheap Big Macs. The American Dream. 🦅
OTOH, my maternal grandparents were born, educated (to some degree), worked, and died in west Tennessee. Of their four kids, only the oldest one left Memphis.
I was fortunate (IMO) to get a suitable education and find an agreeable career right here in the old hometown. Moving elsewhere for school or work just never came up in a serious way. (I had a 100% acceptance from the university I applied to; likewise with my two grad programs.)
A lot of my friends have relocated, of course, to points east, west, and north, and always with the parting admonition for me "to stay in touch." Seems a silly thing for someone leaving to tell someone staying put.
"reader said...
Based on my family the history of the United States was predicated upon families moving to areas with increased opportunity."
Seems to be true for my family also. But I also have living relatives who's family has been homesteading in the same place since the family arrived here. Especially on Prince Edward Island. I have a lot of living relatives there- and my DNA matches to the living ones who've taken ancestry DNA, because it seems almost every one of them is related through multiple lines of descent. Not so for my relatives with ancestors like mine- who all moved around. Their DNA is rarely more then projected for the relationship.
DD - no coercions from Trump. don't want a 50 year mortgage? - fine.
Meanwhile - everything from the corrupt left is grift, fascism, coercion and punishment. sprinkled with lies.
I don't understand this concept. In my family, it was assumed we would move away, and find our own place In the world.
Of the four children in my family, only one stayed local to my parents. The older two, myself and my sister, joined the military, and ended up, at times, half a world away. The youngest brother travelled, but settled down 100 miles from my parents.
My children live hundreds of miles away. Isn't this normal?!
My lowlife older brother lived elsewhere at times (Thailand in the army), various other places (mostly out West, and sometimes as a guest of the justice system) but came back periodically to un-string and crash on ma's couch. After a few weeks or months, our two youngest brothers (who never left home) would eject him and he would go away for a while.
He finally came back broke from Vegas again, but found a desperate woman (a neighbor of my mother and brothers) who he could marry and whose small fortune he could spend on drugs. After a few years he OD'd, barely 200 feet from the house my parents bought in 1960, and where my youngest brother lives still.
All that said, I don't think government policies had much to do with any of it.
I moved across the country three times, the last move from Santa Cruz to New England six years ago was to be near our kids and grandkids. I've spent a substantial amount of time with the grandkids giving them an old school uncompromising and at times uncomfortable upbringing. Best investment ever.
"we need policies in place...."
When someone begins a statement with those words, the rest is invariably nonsense. Geographical mobility is the quintessential American story. How else did the west get so populous? Walsh seems to want America to be more like Europe.
If anything, it's "policies" that have caused people to have to move--policies like being soft on crime, taxing businesses to death, and letting teachers' unions destroy public schools. Like Chris @12:03, I also grew up in Detroit, and saw the massive exodus in the 60s, mainly because of the schools. I and my three siblings all left as young adults to places where opportunities were better.
What's happening is that people are going away to college. By the time they graduate 4 or 5 years later, their childhood home is no longer their home. So they go to where their best first job is. If you don't want so many people moving far from their family, stop sending them to college.
@Peachy. There is plenty of coercion from Trump. You just ignore it. I can make you a list if you need a reminder but it hurts your feelings when people say truthful, unflattering things about Trump.
But let me ask you a question. In the last two week Trump has evangelized 50-year mortgages and boasted about cheap McDonald's food. I find that utterly demoralizing and depressing. This is his "vision for America"?
When you---Peachy---dreamed of "Making America Great Again" is that what you imagined? That doesn't sound great at all. It sounds like neo-serfdom. It sounds like waving the white flag and admitting that America will never be great again and the best we can do is 50 year mortgages. What if he is right? What if America is over and this really is the best we can do. Depressing.
"Joe Bar said...
I don't understand this concept. In my family, it was assumed we would move away, and find our own place In the world....
My children live hundreds of miles away. Isn't this normal?!"
The truthful answer- Yes and no.
Where I live now, for 28 years, breaking the never more then 4 years in one place record until age 42, now 70, all the people in town I've met and interacted with are related to each other within 3 jumps, by blood or marriage. And that's not including the Amish and Mennonites... And, their children and grandchildren, for the most part, live here. Some (GASP!) live 2 or 3, or sometimes, even FOUR towns away! Like they were in a foreign country the way they talk.
3 of our 5 children are living in other states. FL, VA, TX. Oddly, the one in VA was born there currently living just a few blocks from where he lived for a few years after birth. My daughter and son-in-law 20 minutes away. Youngest son living at home just starting his first post-Army job. Him and fiancé will probably end up about 50-60 miles East of here. Unless he gets a far higher paying job elsewhere. The feelers are out. Any of you want to hire a former Captain US Army? With TS clearance? DC area is out...
Of course, in a real society, you'd be giving people the choice.
They do have a choice.
In reality, of course, if you want to do certain work like be a lawyer or an engineer, you probably aren't going to be able to do that in a small town. That's why people moved off the farm, went to college, and ended up in fairly large sized city.
How does this statement square with the first one? Is a society where cities offer different opportunities from towns and rural areas not a "real" society?
Most of the country was red (once upon a time) then progressives started to pop up they took over california and sent their spores north and east and south (washington colorado arizona) add the mass influx north thanks to the amnesty of 1988
We have, at present, three kids in three timezones. One went to college in Seattle, where he was born but only lived until he was 2, fell in love with it and it's praying his career there. One came reluctantly to Texas with us as a young teenager, swore she'd never stay, and is now a lifer (her boyfriend says he wants to build what he calls "the compound," with houses for them, us, and each of her brothers). The youngest is finishing college in Utah and will go where a job is, but he said he'd like to come back to Texas - I'm hoping for some gravitational pull there just to save us travel time among the three of them.
My own natal family lives in northern California, except for me, and the extended family is scattered nationwide with a significant node in Door County where the Irish and French branches came together some hundred-plus years ago. There's an annual family reunion in Baileys Harbor that I try to get to every few years.
* is pursuing his career, that is
Not every way of life has to be comfortable, or even survivable. If you want to make a lot of money, you must be mobile when young. Sorry, it's just true, and always has been. If you don't value money as much, then stay. But don't bitch about the natural result of your choice. I didn't get ahead until I left my small town.
That being said, guess what? You can bring your extended family with you. Grandchildren can have a gravitational effect on retired people. Again, it's choices. People can and should move when required.
I have family members from opposite sides of the planet, so maybe my perspective is different, but I both moved and have lots of family support. Mobility and tolerance for change are choices. America rewards both.
I remember in my hometown, when I graduated from high school, on of the largest factories shut down and moved to Canada for cheaper labor. A tariff might have helped.
Fifty years ago, a Carol King song began plaintively: "You're so far away. Doesn't anyone stay in one place any more?"
More than a century earlier, Horace Greely and others urged Young Men to "Go West".
Walsh is bucking a fixture of American life as old as the country itself, where the perceived opportunities in the Land of Opportunity may lie someplace across the continent.
I want my children to move out and thrive, but not be so far away that their extended family cannot help them when they need the sort of simple daily help that is possible when we live closer together... at the same time, I don't want to be a burden to their success and if moving far away enables that, then I'm all for it. Afterall my great grandparents moved across the ocean to make sure they would have a successful life.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.