Return to Your Hometown
Photo by the author
“I come from a small town, how ‘bout you? / I only mention it ‘cause I’m ready to leave LA / and I want you to come” —Lana Del Rey, “Let Me Love You Like a Woman”
We live in a land of pods. Pretty much like factory farm animals, every generation of a family is separated from each other. The parents are divorced, the grandparents in a nursing home, the kids in New York, the friends scattered across the country.
A society whose highest goal is the liberation of the individual has fomented a culture where any gifted kid in a small town is expected to flee. In fact, the more one divorces themselves from the past—the farther they live from their parents, the less they talk to their childhood friends—the more grown-up or “modern” their life is seen. Those who stay, especially in Middle America, are looked at as losers some way. Provincial. Never got out.
Never mind that there’s nothing there that isn’t over here. Or that society is encouraging its best to abandon their hometowns and sacrifice their prime years to supercities that don’t care about them. When one belongs nowhere, there’s no time to absorb a regional character or way of life, the very definition of culture. No space for Great Friendships or enduring community. One is essentially always a cultural tourist. Some transplants in New York fancy themselves chummy with the ethnic bodega owner until they realize he doesn’t even recognize them.
The very story of the Western individual, what we call the “Hero’s Journey,” requires leaving home in some way. Once upon a time, before opportunities and knowledge beamed down from satellites, the Hero’s Journey was necessary. One must leave the Hinterlands, find the action in the world, join artistic movements based in cities or fight in global wars. (I fight an information war every day from my basement.) Everyone knows that’s no longer the case. The pandemic proved we could work from anywhere. Bitcoin farms glow underground in the countryside (I’ve seen it) and New Yorkers work remotely from Montana.
All across America, and perhaps the world, young people are leaving the big cities for smaller cities, towns, and the country. One reason is that they’re disillusioned with materialistic lifestyles and yearning to feel like they’re a part of something greater. If time is understood as the music of the universe—with the notes of the past, present, and future in satisfying harmony—then each place has its own music. One can only play in the orchestra if they stay.
I recently moved back to Cleveland, where I was born and raised. It’s beautiful to see the energy in the city. Young people are taking creative risks for low rent, opening up their own restaurants, cupcake bakeries, boutiques, skate shops, and studios. I’ve been in-and-out over the last few years, but Cleveland is home—enough that my fishmonger still texts me whenever she stocks the oysters I like, and the Vietnamese spot starts making my pho the moment I walk in. By moving back to Middle America, I’m staking a bet that the most interesting creative energy of these times won’t be found in a downtown scene, but in the “pug’s wrinkles” of America: where the weirdos are, connected by the Internet. The future lies in decentralization. Hyperloop will eventually prove me right and make Texas a few hours from New York City. This may have other consequences—a “hipster gentrification of the countryside,” which sounds awful—but that’s for the future to figure.
I recognize not everyone has the privilege of coming from a cool place like Cleveland. Sometimes your hometown really does suck. Maybe it’s filled with vicious racists or corrupt officials, too many liberals or conservatives, and it’s better off never to return. Yet everyone has a hometown. Your heart knows where it is. Where you were born doesn’t determine it, though there’s a strong correlation. My girlfriend, who grew up in East Africa, moved to Cleveland in her mid-20s, but Cleveland is hers.
For millions of people, their hometown is a big coastal city like New York City or Los Angeles. I know creatures of Los Angeles that are most comfortable baking in sun, wearing sunglasses, among the stars. I have a friend in New York whose ancestral neighborhood is the Upper West Side, and another who’s moving back home to support his beloved and recently widowed mother in Queens.
You’re only on this Earth for a moment. Do you master one place or do you sample many? The nomadic lifestyle has merits of its own, but modernity has made everyone nomads. I’d argue the rarer path in this era—and thus the more interesting—is the one of purity. Roots take time. The rolling countryside, the eclectic suburb, the urban sprawl—these are places one can only learn with years. Years learning the best corned beef sandwich, the best dim sum, the best pho, where to play pinball, where to drink old-style soda, where to go bass fishin’, the best field to see the stars, the best-tasting Saturday brunch buffet, the best trampoline park to take the kids.
Which brings us back to the Hero’s Journey, which has more stops than we remember. Yes, the journey invariably involves leaving home in some way: going West, sailing across the sea, signing with the Miami Heat, liberating Paris, graduating from college in New York. But we forget the last and final stop of the Hero’s Journey.
When Samwise Gamgee lay on the Mountain of Mordor after disposing of the One Ring in its volcanic pit—there, at the end of all things—all he could think of was Rosie and the Shire. That’s what he missed most; that’s what he sacrificed it all for. The War of the Ring was a war to protect their homes. We forget that’s the goal of the Hero’s Journey. To go and get a piece of the world—an education, a fortune, an epic victory—and bring it back to the place we call home.
The 2010s are over. A new age is upon us. Early Millennial ennui, degeneracy, and nihilism must be purged and young people are rediscovering concepts like Tradition, Duty, and God. It is time to follow the path of our ancestors, the stepping stones that led us through the darkness before. I would argue that the children of Middle America—not just in a coastal sense, but in a middle-income, middle-way sense—have a duty to return to their hometowns, or at least give back in some way. Anyone who sees themselves as a countryman or countrywoman surely does. To go where they are needed most. This very magazine, Countere Magazine, is proudly based in Ohio, Montana, and Texas.
The pod is a pod. It’s a mansion in Montecito, parents estranged, with two kids and small yapping dogs. It’s new and disposable, like plastic. However, embracing the past, which is the only way to embrace the future—given each note of time only makes sense considering what came before and after—allows us to live forever. To honor the culture of our forebears and stay in one place (while still traveling a lot) is to be part of an eternal piece of music, as opposed to an errant, wandering note. And spending our greatest years in the most uncommon of places—home—allows us to build a new kind of world, where each place has local character again.
The “whitepill” means having hope in the face of extreme adversity or negative attitudes. Instead of serving the megapolis, returning to our hometowns and cities is a chance to practice a geopolitics of the soul. It means stepping forward from the callous slipstream of civilization and living in a place that loves us back. The one corner of the world we can indisputably call our home, our own little pizza slice of heaven.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our series of “whitepills”—essays on how to be a good person, how to live a good life, and how to do good in an upside-down world.
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