Working / Living / Driving / Living / Driving / Working

Working, independently at home or at a local coffee shop, is pretty much the only way that I could work while living out in the middle of farm country, saving I decided to take up farming. 


Unless I work at home and go nowhere during working hours or can walk or bike to accomplish all work-related activities, working at home still involves a good deal of driving. Way out here, it seems like those that yearn for walkability are few and far between, not necessarily because people do not like walking, but because driving is so infused into American culture and infrastructure that it takes a seemingly herculean effort to plan on not driving daily. It almost seems easier to pick-up and move to a city than to figure out how to live in a rural part of the country without driving. 


(That being said, I actually know a couple who does it.  Neither owns a car, they bike and walk everywhere on a day-to-day basis and occasionally rent a car for bigger shopping trips. It works for them and they seem to be healthier and happier for it, but even they admit that when/if they have kids, they are going to need to get a car.) 


Maybe that is why there is a brain drain from rural places; young people, after being driven around all through childhood in incredibly uncomfortable car seats, have decided that they are not going to take it anymore: sitting in a car, in traffic just to get to a job. That would be my personal motivation for wanting to take my brain elsewhere, if I had a job to which to drive. However, if people keep leaving rural places because there is not full employment opportunities and no public transportation, eventually there will not be anyone left, except those employed by private liberal arts schools in bucolic settings and the farmers, of course. Wait a minute...doh!  


When Generation Y inhabits the oval office maybe something will finally get done around here, but then again maybe not (check out 6/16 episode of The Daily Show's remix of Obama and the previous 7 presidents' promises to get the U.S. off foreign oil).