In defense of small town life

Spring Lake? We went there for a weekend at the shore once. The place was incredibly expensive. We all should be so lucky to grow up in an expensive resort by the sea. Lot different than the small towns I grew up in.

If the people of New Jersey want to subsidize small town life let them. Perhaps small towns that wish to remain small, could accept less state money to do so. The latter would probably be the way to go for rich towns like Spring Lake.

Steve

He is so right about the quality of a smaller police force in dealing with residents.

The idiots calling for centralization such as New Jersy's governor are as much relics of another economic reality, as John McCain calling for a manned mission to Mars. The best thing would be to stop, over managing everything and leave stuff that works alone. I had a missions class in seminary and they where celebrating the fact the most of the worlds people will be urban by the end of the century and live in mega-cities like Bangkok, Mexico City,etc. I was the lone crank who thought that moving all the worlds people into big cities was a bad idea. You know rural poverty is more dignified than city,slum, poverty and if you are on the land, you can better take care of yourself. Urbanization makes poverty worse, it would be better to be peasant in the country than someone lured to a city by dreams of money and ends up making a living rummaging through garbage. I write about third super world cities,because I see the US becoming a dysfunctional third world country.I see attacks on small towns as another step in distabilishing American life, eventually our cities will be as crowded,lacking jobs and will be as unlivable as any third world hell.

I am sure mister governor is in large agreement with people like my least favorite writer Thomas Friedman and is big a globalization and economy of scale shill, which to me,makes him an idiot. Bigger is always better and the myth of inevitable progress is as silly as believing the earth is flat.

Old Susan,

It sounds to me like your own neighborhood is as lacking in economic diversity as Spring Lake, NJ is lacking in both economic and ethnic diversity.

If you don't know "why in the name of heaven" anyone else would "in any way" support a life-style such as your own, then why do you yourself support that life-style, if it's so very hard to justify?

Also, do really believe that "the rest of the population" does nothing at all "in any way" to subsidize your life-style?

Would you support your own neighborhood being weaned off the public teat in the name of "efficiency," in the way in which you seem to relish the thought of Spring Lake being weaned?

I don't mean to pick a fight, I'm just trying to turn the tables and reply your post with the same lack of charity that your post itself shows.

I have no idea if Spring Lake is as virtuous as Manzi makes it seem or as vicious as you make it seem. But I do think you're being a bit self-righteous and casting stones from inside a glass house.

I grew up in a small towm in New York. The town was twenty years behind and falling furhter behind. Would I ever live there again? NO!! Ask me where I grew up and I will tell you I grew in a town that is seven miles down the road from that small pest hole.

My wife finally dragged me back up there as my niece was being married and thought it was such a "wonderful" thing to go and see the house i grew up in, ad nuasem.

The town was much the same as the day I left it. Though I was surprised as to how many of my childhood friends had elected to stay and raise another generation in that town. As for me I hope to never see that town that caused me so much grief and pain ever again. I grew up in Canadaigua N.Y..That was my families mailing address when I was growing up.

Screw this "mayberry" crap. Small towns only promote clannish xenophobic attitudes that seems to make people think that anything in the wider world doesn't, for whatever reason, apply to them.

As for this Gov. Corzine trying to get the small towns to merge is no answer either. I imagine that the beancounters would be happy. However the merging infrastucters may not be as compatable. And that is what this Gov. is not understanding. Not all small towns solves thier day to day problems the same way.

I know the above rant may seem incompatible with my stance of being against merging small towns. When the state or feds start meddling in things like this the invariable appoach of making a cutter cookie one size fits all answer. In the end makes the very problem worse. Like No Child Left Behind.

Wow.

Well, Rod, thanks for your appreciation of a post that was unusually personal, at least by my normal standards. I doubt I’ll do it again. I debated whether or not to respond at all, but felt that since you linked to the post, I owed it to you.

For the commenters, here are my experiences. My dad ran a gas station. The dad's of my best friends growing up (most of whom still are close friends) were: gas company lineman, local lawyer, deli owner, wealthy entrepreneur, retired cop. Draw your own conclusions. I guess it says something about the place that this is literally the first time in my life that I've ever thought to make such a list.

It's true that as the wealth of NYC has pushed ever-farther south, real estate prices have become pretty crazy over the past 25 years or so, and therefore people are now sitting on valuable assets. This also makes it harder for kids from town to buy houses there, which almost everybody agrees is a problem.

I linked in this post to a much more analytical post in which I demonstrated that small towns are the most fiscally-efficient (not just effective) in New Jersey. I don't think that Corzine's fiscal argument, or the rhetoric in this thread that is related to it, even stands on its own merits. If you want to take a dump on the fiscal, and hence moral, irresponsibility of small towns, some numbers sure would be helpful.

Spring Lake is not surrounded on four sides by Oakland. It is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, Sea Girt (population: 2,148), Belmar (population: 6,045) and Spring Lake Heights (population: 5,277).

I used to watch the Andy Griffith Show as a kid. From my recollection the key characters employed outside the home were the sheriff, deputy, gas station guy and the barber. As I said, my dad ran a gas station, our next door neighbor was the police chief, and one of my best friend's dads was a cop.

Let me tell you about the barber. We try to make sure that our kids spend a decent part of each summer in town. Last year I was walking with my then four-year-old son through the "downtown commercial strip" (about four blocks long). As we walked past one of the two barber shops, the barber started banging on the window, stuck his head out the door and shouted my name. My son and I went in, and I asked him about his son, who is a few years younger than me, but whom we have always talked about since he also studied science in college. He told my son that he "used to cut your pop's hair". He gave my son a lollipop from the same spot under the window where he used to pull them out for me, when I came here with my father, whose hair he used to cut too. In fact, the very first memory I have of my father I ever doing something together as just the two of us was when he took me here for my first haircut in this chair in this shop by this man. In 1967.

I really don't want to get into a fight about all this. The place means a lot to me, as it does to most (but not all) people I know from there. As I tried to indicate, it's not for everybody. If it's not something you like, so be it.

Old Susan,

Thanks for the reply. By the time of your post at 1:14, you seemed to have moderated your view quite a bit.

I appreciate your willingness to temper your take in response to constructive criticism and I welcome the same sort of criticism myself if ever take a stance that someone finds to be excessive or over the top.

As someone who grew up in a small town, what I don't understand is why anything positive said about life in small towns has to be taken as some sort of romanticizing of small-town life that covers up up the negative aspects that small towns share with everywhere else.

Life in big cities is sentimentalized and romanticized just as often as life in small towns. If memory serves, folks in small towns are subjected to Frank Sinatra singing "New York, New York" and "Chicago" just as often as city slickers are subjected to the whistling of the Andy Griffith theme.

And I must say that big cities can be just as parochial as any small town -- just try visiting any big city north of the Mason-Dixon line, with a Southern accent. In fact, I think that some of the reflexive bashing of small towns on this thread is evidence itself (in some cases) of the parochialism I describe.

Anyway, like the man said, "can't we all just get along" -- sometimes, once in while?

The reason most people live in big urban areas, even when they'd really prefer not to (of course some people want to live in cities, but not nearly as many people as the number who actually do live there) is that the urban area is where we can make a living.

I don't know much about the midwest, but small towns - I mean, really isolated towns, not bedrooms for nearby big cities - tend to be withering in California. Because there's no economic base. Spring Lake, a resort, seems to be supported by New York City. Many "small towns" in California are within commute distance of big urban areas (or used to be within commute distance before the price of gas went up!).

Even if, as Another Believer says, small patches of land, if cared and worked for intensively, can produce a high concentration of varied food - enough to feed a number of families, year-round, if they can and preserve the extra. Still, they'd want to buy extra meat, coffee, chocolate, and things which don't grow in temperate climates. Indeed they would. They'd also need money for shoes, for medical care, for college tuition, for automobiles, for appliances, for gasoline...the list goes on and on. You might be able to eat out of your "small plot," but that doesn't answer the rest of these questions. Unless one is willing to go all the way back to the land and do without all the commodities I just listed (and a whole lot more).

I'm not pleased by the vision of the future as being a series of giant mega-cities, but I'm sort of not seeing my way clear to any other vision.

mdavid,

I'm sorry for you that your life experiences have been what they have been. But my anecdotal evidence -- as opposed to your anecdotal evidence -- suggests that many, many, many more people are living contented lives of the sort that Jim Manzi describes than you seem willing to allow -- not a majority of people, but a large plurality consisting of millions and millions. That fact should be no rebuke to you or any cause for hostility on your part toward those who have been luckier than you in some regards. People who have managed to live lives with which they are content in small towns or wherever else don't owe you or anyone else any special apology for having done so. The weirdly negative tone of this whole thread makes me wonder if comboxes on this site are worth my time. This place seems to be a magnet for a kind of nay-saying and ressentiment that goes beyond what's really called for and verges on someone once called -- in a different context, but in a phrase that's wonderfully apt -- "therapeutic alienation." If every small town from coast to coast were razed to the ground and if everyone who lives in them bowed down in sackcloth and ashes to repent of the grievous, grievous sin of not living in the city, I still don't think some people would be satisfied.

Something to keep in mind: most of America was not nearly as affluent fifty, forty, or thirty years ago as it is today. I have a passing familiarity with Spring Lake, N.J. I'm not familiar with Jim Manzi, but if he was a young child in the mid-to-late 1960s, Spring Lake, although pleasant, would not have been nearly as well off as it is today.

Cuchulain, you write very well, but I'm surprised that you think this site is pro-urban. That's not my perception at all. From what I can tell, only a handful of commenters (including me) actually live within the limits of a large city. I think many readers here idealize small towns, and the majority appear to live in suburbs or medium-sized towns.

Cuchulain, That fact should be no rebuke to you or any cause for hostility on your part toward those who have been luckier than you in some regards.

Huh? You don't get me at all. I'm quite aware of people who have had positive life experiences and America, don't begrudge it, and never even even implied I did.

I'm merely warning that based upon my assessment of the situation, the percentage of peoople with my life experiences is growing, and has been for some time. And in my opinion, people who can't see this need to get out more, or look at the statistics. Either should suffice.

From a shooe, my friend, from a shooe. Creamy.