Things You Missed Before Thanksgiving
Make villages full of families again
I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving and spent an enjoyable time with family and/or friends! May the forgiving grace of God for which we can be most thankful carry us into the Advent season with joy.
The following is one of several articles on this blog that argues for a way the world could improve while assuming other improvements that would be necessary for this one to work. Some articles may bridge that back to the modern world, and others may not. As people are interested or I have time, I will continue this series until I have hopefully written about all those pieces.
Until then, please beware of the assumptions; you’re welcome to ask about any or all of them!
Yesterday I received one of the saddest texts I’ve received in a long while. Out of respect for my friend’s privacy, I will refrain from quoting it, but her message effectively said: “My brother has a beard!” The subtext: my family has changed drastically and I was not there to see it.
Incidentally, I watched those texts arrive while I was driving to see family. To return to one’s home over Thanksgiving is a wonderful thing. No amount of transience in society can change that. However, I realized as I drove that something has changed in our world.
Society now expects that young men and women will regularly travel to visit family, instead of regularly seeing family at everyday activities (like church, community events, etc.).
I can hear the peanut gallery now, “Walking five minutes to your family’s house is also travel!”. Yes, I know. I refer to the half-hour, hour, or up-to-day-long drives and flights people now regularly use to reach their families.1 The holidays make a relevant example, but I mean this for all times and seasons of the year.
It strikes me that so many young women and men of the world are being dragged from their households unnecessarily. The dream that has seized their imagination (and that of their parents) is a secondary degree, the sort of stamp of approval that gets you into any job as almost a guarantee. Sons and daughters run off to school, and if the job opportunities open the way they tend to, those students may never live within walking distance of their families again.
Can we not let these children see their siblings grow up? Perhaps their nieces, their nephews, or even their friends? Parents retire, grandparents grow old, and families change permanently in the years a young adult is gone, but that young person will never learn from or know of those moments until they have already passed. As much as I hate the phrase “living in the moment,” these are the moments all people ought to be able to live in!
Now historians and people who lived in these times can correct me if I am wrong, but this is what I understand to be true.
In the olden days, it was expected that young men might travel the world, learn new things, and bring them back home. It was also expected that those journeys might open areas of service in vocation (perhaps through marriage) that would lead those young men to settle near their wives’ families. Whether such abandonment would be the norm, I do not know. It does not seem so. Rather, the young men would travel, defend their families, and eventually pass on what they had learned to nearby younger family members before they died.
Where were the young women? At home, anchoring the culture of their households and villages, protected by the steadiness of institutions from the forces that men were expected to go and face. Women did not need to go anywhere to face those forces: the cultural battles came to them, and maintaining a well-ordered society was more a part of their lives than the dishwashing to which our disdainful culture has demeaned them. They were central to learning from and teaching everyone who passed through the town, and even more those who remained within. As the monasteries were to Western Civilization, so in some ways were women to their villages and towns.
I do not advocate locking up young women in the home by force or tyranny, as it seems that needs to be made clear.
When immigration toward the United States began, a mark of the trials that the immigrants suffered was that their families would be sacrificed.2 To go to America was often caused by the only two motivations that should reasonably overcome family ties so extremely: faith and survival. As that changed, most people went to join those family members who had made a difficult choice, and much of early American immigration policy formed around that idea.3 Who would separate a family by such a distance, after all?
Our ancestors saw separation from family as a problem and built increasingly powerful machines in part to reunite them. The transoceanic ships were built up and improved, airplanes were put into civilian service, and people even made the Hindenburg in a vain attempt to make such travel sustainable. Automobiles were bought to transport families and what they needed from one place to another without the effort of caring for a horse. All these tools we made to connect ourselves more, and now we’ve leaned on them to create a society with more distance and distractions than before we tried to fix the problem.
I know some aspects of the society I just presented may seem shocking and restrictive to the denizens of this epoch, part of a barbaric earlier age. It is from an earlier time, but I cannot call it barbaric. Is it good to ship our young women off into the wide world at eighteen, expecting the same thing of them that we do of young men? Certainly not, although the lengths to which we can go in good conscience should be debated.
I do not advocate locking up young women in the home by force or tyranny, as it seems that needs to be made clear.
What I do advocate is that the expectations we have of our youths and world are not such that they all would miss their brothers’ aging years. Many moments happen in the life of a family that can only be lived once, and once gone can never be again. To miss all of those is neither good for the family in its long-term nor for its present members.
Perhaps I am the victim of a particular subsection of American life, and these expectations I see are not as general as they seem. So be it, I will rejoice for others; the minority in which I live ought to join their ranks.
If I am not such a victim, then why are a minority of people pursuing geographic proximity to their families this way? Worse yet, why do those who think this way about their families allow themselves to be carried away by the winds of modern transience? Our pastors, our military, and those workers called by faith or country to leave cannot be so numerous that they account for everyone who cares about their families and still abandons them. The families I know who have stayed together are rare and viewed as eccentric, perhaps dangerous, relics of another age. No one cares that their families grow together.. Instead of being lauded for societal integrity, their lives are judged and shunned.
Perhaps our airplane-distanced life is just a curse I must learn to bear or even a blessing I am too blind to see. But when I see my friends, the village I have built for myself in my family’s relative absence, hurt by that distance… I cannot believe that the life made easier by airplanes is the bar-none better life after all. I truly cannot believe that such separation from our families as the core of our lives is a life we should love or even accept.
Society will likely continue to expect that long-distance holiday travel is an acceptable substitute for families continuing to live close to each other. Unless people start to pursue nearness to family in such numbers that their existence demands something different, the cycle will continue. Let’s make families sticking together normal again, or at least less surprising.
This is the best I can find… Pew didn’t even look at walking distance. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/18/more-than-half-of-americans-live-within-an-hour-of-extended-family/#:~:text=Roughly%20equal%20shares%20of%20Americans,near%20any%20extended%20family%20members.