Aside from which, if all involved progressives left these states, the Senate would be locked in for conservatives for a very long time. There are practical considerations!
Moving around feels pretty natural to me. We lived in 3 different states in my childhood, and I've lived in a couple more as an adult. My mom and both her parents were Army brats.
My wife is an immigrant -- having left her homeland to be with me. She, her brother, their father, and his father were all born in the same house. But it was in four different countries over that time period, which is a different kind of movement.
The Whitefish I lived in from 1978 to 1981 seems pretty much gone. Watersheds are still there, of course, but the human environment shifts in fits and starts.
Even the Whitefish of 1994 (when I graduated high school) doesn't really exist, though there are remnants of it, which is why it's still a good place to live.
We moved around a fair bit when I was growing up. Six schools in six years. I always thought of myself as a nomad until I brought my family back here a few years ago. Was happy to live overseas (less happy to live in New York). I was surprised somewhat by the strength of the feeling of belonging, that I owed this place some kind of loyalty, but it's there.
That said, it's sheer good fortune that my spouse loves it here. We've been married over 20 years and he's never expressed a desire to move back to England. If that changed, I'd have to rethink, of course. He's entitled to soil-loyalty, too.
I'm so in to this documentary series "Can't Get You Out of My Head" that you recommended -- it's kind of mesmerizing and dread-full at once. I remember a million years ago watching "Brazil" at a movie theater in Chapel Hill and coming out of the movie and into an alley and feeling similarly disoriented both physically and emotionally.
Right?! Disoriented physically and emotionally is such a good description. I still can't describe it and feel like I should rewatch it and also ... don't want to. But also I learned so much about things I knew nothing about!
I have now watched it and it's very ... well, all the things of loss and environmental destruction and disregard for life and wonderfully told/filmed ...
But then after it ended I had to go look up "China ghost cities" and went down a whole meandering path there. What a weird world we live in.
Yeah, that juxtaposition was really wild. It leads to a lot of questions about our own society as well. Probably a lot more questions than answers, to be honest.
Always. I read a great article about concrete a few years ago, and the places where sand is mined to make it. It was specifically about this one sand mine that was providing the materials for the concrete for Apple's new headquarters and all the implications and problems inherent in the mining, the concrete, the all of it.
Oh man. I think that just went on my stuff-to-watch queue. (Also, I didn't want to quote your "loyalty to frustrating soil" line without permission but it was very much on my mind if you can't tell!)
Use that shit! It's not mine to keep, anyways. And this week has already been an incredibly inhumane week in the Arkansas legislature, so I think we're probably asking the same questions of the world right now.
And that film is - as I remember it - pretty impactful. I saw it at a non-fiction film festival along with like 4 other films on the same day, but I remember it doing some really interesting and challenging things both with idea of a narrative and the story they were telling.
A film festival ... with other people ... I'm trying to imagine.
Same re the legislature, yeah. We've seen some bad bills knocked down but many scrape through and it's hard.
I'm a nonfiction writer not a journalist, but carry around some of those adjacent ethics, one of which is to not to quote people without permission! At least not from personal conversation, public or not. I'm pretty strict about it. That quote above is from a public comment left on my essay, so I feel okay about it as it wasn't a personal exchange.
On a related-ish note, I think I'm starting to rework my mental framework around the idea of immigrating. I see no reason why we don't regard certain types of inta-American moves between states (for example, moving from Arkansas to California or Illinois) similar to how we might regard someone moving from Spain to Germany. Just a string to pull, I guess.
This is more common some places than others. Montanans are, ime, way more focused on whether you've moved here from somewhere else than, say, Californians are. It would be silly for people in DC to set the same kind of bar that Montanans do. And even among Montanans, certainly every election features candidates bragging about the 5 generations their family has been here, while somehow this isn't a competition readily won by Indigenous candidates.
That whole generations thing is getting really old. I use it in certain situations because I know it's currency, but the gross thing is that I know it's currency. If I went up to a city council meeting and said my family has been here for tens of thousands of years, I'd get a different response. As Chris La Tray has pointed out, us fifth-generation Montanans are just pointing out our complicity in land theft and violence.
There are variations of this in other places. We used to visit friends on Cape Cod a lot, and there was definitely an insider-outsider sense, though I must say Cape Coders tended to be nice about it, maybe because many of their families had been there soooo much longer.
But the one place I've lived that felt most foreign to me was Boston. It made me sad a lot (maybe it was all the garbage and rats around), and I never could feel at home there.
I think that is very true. It's really a vast country, which we forget about sometimes, with varied cultures. A friend of mine once wrote an essay about living in Hawaii as a native Mississippian, and those sentiments were memorable. I lived in the Northeast for about 15 years and it always felt foreign.
I think you have a similar sense of loss, of displacement, and restructure in your life. The currency may be the same, but the world can be completely different.
Thank you, Nia. I feel similarly about Kentucky. Folks ask why we don’t leave, and you’ve captured beautifully why we don’t and don’t want to.
That beloved land with its maddening people ...
Aside from which, if all involved progressives left these states, the Senate would be locked in for conservatives for a very long time. There are practical considerations!
Moving around feels pretty natural to me. We lived in 3 different states in my childhood, and I've lived in a couple more as an adult. My mom and both her parents were Army brats.
My wife is an immigrant -- having left her homeland to be with me. She, her brother, their father, and his father were all born in the same house. But it was in four different countries over that time period, which is a different kind of movement.
The Whitefish I lived in from 1978 to 1981 seems pretty much gone. Watersheds are still there, of course, but the human environment shifts in fits and starts.
Even the Whitefish of 1994 (when I graduated high school) doesn't really exist, though there are remnants of it, which is why it's still a good place to live.
We moved around a fair bit when I was growing up. Six schools in six years. I always thought of myself as a nomad until I brought my family back here a few years ago. Was happy to live overseas (less happy to live in New York). I was surprised somewhat by the strength of the feeling of belonging, that I owed this place some kind of loyalty, but it's there.
That said, it's sheer good fortune that my spouse loves it here. We've been married over 20 years and he's never expressed a desire to move back to England. If that changed, I'd have to rethink, of course. He's entitled to soil-loyalty, too.
I'm so in to this documentary series "Can't Get You Out of My Head" that you recommended -- it's kind of mesmerizing and dread-full at once. I remember a million years ago watching "Brazil" at a movie theater in Chapel Hill and coming out of the movie and into an alley and feeling similarly disoriented both physically and emotionally.
Right?! Disoriented physically and emotionally is such a good description. I still can't describe it and feel like I should rewatch it and also ... don't want to. But also I learned so much about things I knew nothing about!
I can't read the quote from the video without thinking of this film: https://grasshopperfilm.com/film/behemoth/
I have now watched it and it's very ... well, all the things of loss and environmental destruction and disregard for life and wonderfully told/filmed ...
But then after it ended I had to go look up "China ghost cities" and went down a whole meandering path there. What a weird world we live in.
Yeah, that juxtaposition was really wild. It leads to a lot of questions about our own society as well. Probably a lot more questions than answers, to be honest.
Always. I read a great article about concrete a few years ago, and the places where sand is mined to make it. It was specifically about this one sand mine that was providing the materials for the concrete for Apple's new headquarters and all the implications and problems inherent in the mining, the concrete, the all of it.
Oh man. I think that just went on my stuff-to-watch queue. (Also, I didn't want to quote your "loyalty to frustrating soil" line without permission but it was very much on my mind if you can't tell!)
Use that shit! It's not mine to keep, anyways. And this week has already been an incredibly inhumane week in the Arkansas legislature, so I think we're probably asking the same questions of the world right now.
And that film is - as I remember it - pretty impactful. I saw it at a non-fiction film festival along with like 4 other films on the same day, but I remember it doing some really interesting and challenging things both with idea of a narrative and the story they were telling.
A film festival ... with other people ... I'm trying to imagine.
Same re the legislature, yeah. We've seen some bad bills knocked down but many scrape through and it's hard.
I'm a nonfiction writer not a journalist, but carry around some of those adjacent ethics, one of which is to not to quote people without permission! At least not from personal conversation, public or not. I'm pretty strict about it. That quote above is from a public comment left on my essay, so I feel okay about it as it wasn't a personal exchange.
Seems other worldly, doesn't it?
On a related-ish note, I think I'm starting to rework my mental framework around the idea of immigrating. I see no reason why we don't regard certain types of inta-American moves between states (for example, moving from Arkansas to California or Illinois) similar to how we might regard someone moving from Spain to Germany. Just a string to pull, I guess.
This is more common some places than others. Montanans are, ime, way more focused on whether you've moved here from somewhere else than, say, Californians are. It would be silly for people in DC to set the same kind of bar that Montanans do. And even among Montanans, certainly every election features candidates bragging about the 5 generations their family has been here, while somehow this isn't a competition readily won by Indigenous candidates.
That whole generations thing is getting really old. I use it in certain situations because I know it's currency, but the gross thing is that I know it's currency. If I went up to a city council meeting and said my family has been here for tens of thousands of years, I'd get a different response. As Chris La Tray has pointed out, us fifth-generation Montanans are just pointing out our complicity in land theft and violence.
There are variations of this in other places. We used to visit friends on Cape Cod a lot, and there was definitely an insider-outsider sense, though I must say Cape Coders tended to be nice about it, maybe because many of their families had been there soooo much longer.
But the one place I've lived that felt most foreign to me was Boston. It made me sad a lot (maybe it was all the garbage and rats around), and I never could feel at home there.
I think that is very true. It's really a vast country, which we forget about sometimes, with varied cultures. A friend of mine once wrote an essay about living in Hawaii as a native Mississippian, and those sentiments were memorable. I lived in the Northeast for about 15 years and it always felt foreign.
I think you have a similar sense of loss, of displacement, and restructure in your life. The currency may be the same, but the world can be completely different.