Go to any American city and ask a teenager what there is to do in this town and they’ll tell you, “Nothing.”
Ask adults what there is to do and they’ll tell you, “We don’t have much to offer. Kids need someplace safe to go after school.” Doesn’t matter if the town has 8,000 people or 800,000.
This malaise is curious to me. I grew up in a small town, lived in a big city for 20 years, and now live in a small town again. Seems to me the kids in my hometown of Salem (pop. ~7,000 at the time) had all sorts of opportunities to participate in the usual school activities like theatre, band, sports, etc. Plus little league teams and scouts and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.
Here in Ludington, MI (pop. 8,000), kids seem to have all the same things to do. I see lots of kids skateboarding at the skate park, fishing, kayaking, marching in parades with the band, putting on art shows, and lots of the same things adults might do for fun.
In Indianapolis (pop. ~900,000), it struck me how amazing it must have been to be a young person capable of getting to museums, huge libraries, and other things that work only at the scale of large metros all through public transit. The holdup for many small-town kids is usually transportation to get places. Here in Ludington, many young people who live in town get around with scooters or bikes. Not something that’s easy to do all the time if you live 10 miles out of town.
Instead, the problem in Indianapolis seemed to be that kids were running around unsupervised too much, that curfews were needed, and police spent gobs of time on weekend nights “babysitting” and “parenting”. Nothing’s stopping the small-town kids from getting into trouble, but it sure doesn’t seem like small-town kids are shooting each other. I find this dichotomy fascinating as a social problem and terrifying.
Small towns have a branding problem
If I had grown up on the east side of Indianapolis instead of Salem, it’s hard telling what or how my life would have unfolded. But there are plenty of schools in Indy that don’t have teams, bands, or other extracurriculars like other schools (how is it possible a small town school can have this stuff?).
This, to me, has always been the most damning evidence against “school administration costs” because I still do not understand how it is possible that even the smallest schools can support a football team and a band and a theatre program and all the other stuff you image schools have, but somehow districts with the highest per-pupil funding anywhere don’t. Perhaps there are reasons I’m too dumb to understand, but this doesn’t pass a cursory sniff test.
I’d argue there is a certain richness that comes from living in a small town that you can’t replicate anywhere else. That living in a small town is the closest most people can reasonably get in the 21st century to Thomas Jefferson’s Americana that he imagined this country could be.
But a branding problem of sorts exists. There’s the lack of jobs in many small towns — something I hear a lot of around here. That may be true, but it seems to be the case nationwide. This mirrors the “there’s nothing to do” refrain most people will tell you they and their kids face.
I’m not so sure. Is it possible that people just have lousy or out-of-touch expectations? Or maybe the expectations are too high? That maybe they think the world should be a constant carnival ride of fun, excitement, ease, and perfection? (That’s not inherently wrong, but it does seem unrealistic.)
You could airdrop into Salem right now and the first person you met would tell you “There’s nothing in this town.” I’d argue Salem is certainly worse off today than it was 20-30 years ago due to employment collapses and other small quality-of-life factors. But it’s still probably a great place to grow up. Still, someone would think they ought to have arcades and amusement parks and this ill-defined and mystical “neat thing to do”. Almost like how your fridge should always have a similarly mystical “just what I wanted to eat” stocked in the back somewhere. At some point you’re going to have to get groceries.
No, I’m inclined to believe the expectations are wrong. That everyone’s own pursuit of happiness is soiled by fear and loathing. To some, kids should be in church. To others, kids are like wolves who wandered down from the mountains and are about to pillage the town. Others still no doubt think the loss of their favorite haunt — like a bowling alley or a malt shop — indicates there’s nothing of value.
To say nothing of phones and the web, that (perhaps rightly) have degraded our kids and adults’ ability or desire to go meet or talk to people, do things, or just be humane.
Could it be that maybe our expectations are out of whack? That maybe it’s enough to be able to go play in the woods? Or hike up a big hill in the rain and laugh about it? Or just talk?
Instead, we’ve ratcheted our expectations in weird ways. Play time is now a thing to be engineered — like through video games — for maximum attention and dopamine.
We constantly communicate with everyone through texts, so how can it be any fun to get together and talk in person?
That we must always be comfortable and have what we want when we want it.
Employment is a critical component of life (one Jefferson would likely not have approved of, short of being able to work their own farm), and small towns struggle mightily with this. And for some top performers, small towns are not big enough for their ambitions. But I’m bullish on small towns if only because the Internet — the one thing tearing us apart half the time — may also be a tool to bring it all together. That work-from-anywhere can enable people to move into small towns over the next generation, thus stabilizing schools, housing costs, and communities in new ways.
Like so much of life, it is what we can reasonably make of it. Small towns aren’t capitalizing on this. Seems to me a town that focused less on the glitzy “Look at random people on the sidewalk!” and instead embraced “There’s barely anything here, and that’s the whole point” might do well.
Because assuming hunger, shelter, and other basic needs are reasonably met, the rest of life is just properly understanding the role of “reasonable” and “enough.”
