Supporting your local community?

Frank James grumbles about absentees:

When I was young when a new industry moved into the area, everyone involved with it; workers, sales staff and white collar management; moved into the community with it.  They assumed positions of responsibility both within their industry and company as well as within the community. You could find these people on church boards, school boards and involved with summer activities that benefited a whole range of people.  That is no longer true.

Now, if a new business moves into a rural community, ...the educated staff or those with sought after skills only come into the local community during working hours.  And by that I mean the scientists operating any research lab, the white collar management personnel and/or the people who actually own the business.  When working hours are over, they escape to the larger communities some distance away simply because our small local communities are not good enough for their wives.
...
...Many within our community bust their butts to get new employment into the community and when they succeed our schools deteriorate because the overall student initiative plunges, instead of improves.  We don’t get the kids from the more educated families, instead we get the “transits,”...members of families that move from place to place following whatever low wage work they can find...

Be careful what you wish for.  Times have changed, but the people have changed, too.  Nowadays it’s likely that an incoming company’s “educated staff” and “white collar management personnel” will be Yumpies, bringing along all the social burdens that Yumpies create.  

They won’t be found on the church board, because most don’t attend church; their Sunday mornings are reserved for reading the New York Times at the nearest Starbucks.  Their interest in the local schools is to agitate for “environmental studies” courses (because farmers don’t know anything about the environment!) or perhaps to abolish the Boy Scouts (for being “discriminatory”) or R.O.T.C. (for â€œteaching children to kill people”).  Summer activities?  They’ll be backpacking in Europe, thanks.  And prepare for draconian zoning and land-use regulations (heaven help you if you want to raise hogs or chickens), mandatory recycling programs, and higher taxes.

Ask the native Coloradans, or long-time residents of Texas’s Travis County, what it’s like to have their local culture turned upside down by a bunch of incoming arrogant know-it-alls.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:54:46 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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