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June 14, 2006
O Albany
This morning the Good Rabbi, one of the great pyromaniacs of the American century (yes, yes: essentially stealing from the Good Doctor's eulogy for George Plimpton) and fellow former resident of Albany, NY, sent me an article about the flight of young people from upstate New York. As I researched this post, I noticed that this is the second most emailed story in the NY Times right now: it matters to many people. I am part of the great mass of young people, now in their twenties and thirties, who grew up in upstate New York in the Seventies and Eighties but have now left for more promising shores. I will be the first to admit that I have not done the best job keeping up with grade and high school classmates, but my informal understanding through the grapevine is that most of them have left. Even more ominously, it appears that higher educational status appears to be a positive predictor of leaving (though this is casual empiricism...oh no, I'd never engage in that). From what I have seen, it seems as if most left for the South. A big cohort lives in the DC area, still others actually live somewhere in this near mythical state of Tarheelandia, while still others have moved even farther into the South. Florida seems popular (which is only natural: we didn't read Carl Hiassen's stuff in high school lit classes in Upstate New York in the Seventies and Eighties, and hence could never really have understood what we were getting ourselves into by moving to Florida).
Some parts of upstate have certainly fared worse than others. In terms of youth flight, it seems as if the last decade was more brutal where my wife grew up, in one of those ethnic, big hair, yes-we-pre-supposed-Wayne's-World, the world is Kodak and Kodak is the world (the kind of place where people were saying "Micro...what was that...soft? Apple?!? Do you mean the fruit?" as recently as 14 months ago) suburban towns that, in cooperation with the lake, have Rochester well nigh surrounded.
Anyway, when you talk to former Upstaters now living in Dixie, they invariably offer some justification based on the brutal winters (which we can juxtapose against the mild, enjoyable summers here in the South) and then talk a bit about job opportunities. I don't really buy the weather argument, unless these guys really have turned into a bunch of Nancys since their days two decades or more ago of playing the man's game (hockey, for you philistines) on a thousand frozen ponds in Upstate.
The real reason people left, lets face it, was no jobs: if the people can't keep steaks in the fridge, you can't keep the people in your community. I blame Mario Cuomo and his ilk: he was the grand pooh-bah when I was growing up. The ultimate Cadillac liberal, he taxed and regulated Upstate New York to death, sucking out its entrpreneurial chi in the process. I think the emotional side of the harsh feelings the adult me has toward economic liberals (liberal in the 1975, not 1875, sense, of course) comes from the part of me that grew up in Upstate New York in the Cuomo era and then watched as the saga played out afterwards: those people, in the misguided (and frankly, to a degree, selfish..yes, selfish, but I'll elaborate later) pursuit of their egalitarian utopia, destroyed the place where I grew up.* To me, the so-called progressives represent a potential disaster in the making: put their ideas into play anywhere in the US, and they'll create another New York. Tacitus once wrote of the Roman conquest of Carthage "they made a desert, and called it peace". When I think about the liberal/"progressive" (because that is all that progressive economic policy ideas are: a cheap, budget renta repackaging of tired leftist policy proposals that are in no sense new or "progressive", and have failed everywhere that they have been taken seriously), I'm moved to paraphrase: they made a desert, and called it justice.
There are few or no little boys on those hockey ponds these days, I'm told.
But you can forward their parents mail to Fairfax County, Virgina.
* Yes, yes: NY has had a Republican governor for a main era now. But he inherited an awesomely over-powerful state government from Cuomo and then went on to succeed in proving only that the Romans were right: absolute power does corrupt absolutely. There's your legacy, Governor Pataki.
Posted by dag at June 14, 2006 10:11 AM
Comments
I agree. It's also interesting how this vaunted tech valley initiative has completely and utterly failed to be the boon everyone was expecting. Funny how excessive business taxes can drive businesses to not hire people...
Posted by: The Good Rabbi at June 14, 2006 11:04 AM