Opting For Elsewhere by Brian Hoey

Professor Brian Hoey gets right to the point; once upon a time, Americans migrated to Detroit for work, and now they leave Detroit to begin their lives.  He uses the Simon and Garfunkel song “America” as an ironic example, and I say ironic, because Saginaw has emptied and the houses sell for a dollar. Cities all over the USA, be they St. Louis, Detroit, or Flint, they’re all emptying out. It seems that Americans aren’t really leaving to find adventure, but fleeing.

In the second chapter, titled “Constructing the Good,” the author delves into the old ideal of small town USA, with its main street, back streets, small homes, affluent parts, boarding houses where the unmarried teachers lived. If you read To Kill A Mockingbird, or a Sinclair Lewis novel, you’ll know what I mean by the small town life, where everyone exists in a mutually beneficial relationship. You had rich and poor, good and bad, young and old, all within a short distance from each other. But that’s been disappearing for years. People wanted big houses and small ones emptied, and now young people have stopped buying houses altogether. Remember Dixon, Illinois, where President Reagan was born in an apartment above a shoe store? I bet that today, such an apartment would be synonymous with “loser.”

Hoey uses case studies of people who migrate far and wide. Some you might call “artists” who want low living costs and peace, others move for work, some travel in camping vans. I recon a lot of Walmart parking lots all over the nation are seeing an influx of campers, some enjoying the experience, others probably aren’t. Greg Brown’s song Boomtown is displayed in its entirety, and he sings about the artists, tourists, and the displacement. You can see a sizeable example of migration in Manhattan; we have many homeless people in the city, and almost none of them are locals. They come from small towns in Upstate New York, fleeing for different reasons. Many of the younger ones have been thrown out by their families, and in small towns the police don’t tolerate vagrancy. New York is the only city where they’ll be accepted. In today’s economy, there’s greater incentive to throw kids out.

Opting For Elsewhere isn’t so much about migration, but the way collapsing cities have sent Americans on a “discovery trail.” May they all find prosperity, and if not, may they all find their peace.