Hit the Road, Jack

It's a Random Quote From the Internet, but one that resonates with a lot of people.

I've been told, "If you don't like here...leave." Sadly, those that are brainwashed, believe that is the answer.

I'm going to stand up for the idea of leaving places where one doesn't like the system for a moment. I know that this will have people looking for traces of shampoo in my gray matter, but it's like that sometimes. When most people say: "If you don't like here...leave," it comes across as a mean spirited-dismissal, especially when people follow that up with statements like: "Because if don't like Government, Somalia doesn't have one," or "If you want Socialism, North Korea's trying it," or "If you think Christians are bad, go to Iran," or something equally bitter. It is, to be sure, an outgrowth of an American habit of wishing bad things on people who irritate us by failing to parrot or values back at us.

But there is a different perspective to be had, and it's one that I tend to take. I currently live in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, a bit over two thousand miles from my native Chicago, Illinois, and its suburbs, where I grew up. The reason for this is a simple one - the Puget Sound area was presented as a better place for me than Chicagoland, so I made the switch. Purely by chance, I'd timed it well, and was fairly quickly doing much better for myself here than I was there. So allow me this one question - how long do you think it would have taken me to reshape, say, Batavia into something more like Bothell? Especially if the people living in Batavia were happy with Batavia. The current population of Batavia is about 26,000 people - given the choice between picking a fight with them and simply packing up and moving, moving makes more sense to me.

So why not apply that on a broader scale? We allow our attachment to the places we consider "home," a discomfort with significant change and a level of parentalism to push us into working to reshape the places where we live, in the face of opposition from other people who live there, rather than looking for places that fit our requirements (at least more closely than where we currently live does) and simply moving there.