The down side of a stable place

Amy Welborn and her family moved this summer from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Birmingham, Alabama -- and boy, does she ever shake the dust off her feet in this post. It's well worth reading (is Amy ever not?), especially for people like me who lament the lack of tradition and stability in urbanity. Amy writes of the down side of a close-knit community, concluding that there's a thin line between healthy stability and suffocating stasis:

The resultant culture was rather inbred and closed to the newcomer. As I explained to my (sometimes frustrated and hurt) daughter many times, I really believe that what we could see in this is that dynamic of how our greatest strength can be our greatest weakness, as well. A community needs continuity, stability and tradition. It is good for an institution like a school to have deep roots, to have a stadium filled on a Friday night with alumni watching their grandsons heave a football and their granddaughters play in the band or cheer. One of the most wonderful teachers any of my children have had was Joseph's kindergarten teacher who had attended his school herself and sent her own children through it. She was deeply committed, faith-filled and a rock.

But. How easy it is for the "close-knit" community to settle. To come to believe that its reason for existence extends no further than the comfort and satisfaction of those Friday nights filled with familiar faces and rituals. For close-knit to evolve into clannishness, pure and simple.

I had a beer yesterday with a reader in town for business. We talked about small-town life. He grew up in a small Southern town, and though he lives in a major city today, his company does business in small towns scattered throughout the country, where their factory is always the biggest employer. He said that he's never been able to come to terms with the lack of curiosity among the people in those places -- the complete indifference, if not outright hostility, to anything different. I responded that that's probably just the human condition, but it's exacerbated by mobility. The people who would be part of any town's creative class would once upon a time have returned to the town to hang out a shingle as a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, etc., and leavened the community by their interests. And in turn, they would have been shaped by living among others not like them. Nowadays, though, it's easy, and often mandatory, for them to leave for the big city in search of work and of marriageable partners. I don't know what the answer to this is. But as we get more and more segregated along these lines, you end up with culture wars like the one that erupted over Sarah Palin, which was really class war in disguise. Urban people fear and loathe small town and city people, and vice versa. Same planet, different worlds.

UPDATE: If you'd like to discuss specifics of Amy's post about Fort Wayne, please go do so at the thread at her blog. If you want to talk about the general points she was making about small-town (or small-city) life, then let's continue here. I'd rather not let this thread turn into a referendum on Amy Welborn; let's keep it at the issues she raises.