Traveling

I am on the road today, heading down to Houston for the Ordinariate's Chrism Mass tonight. The ease with which we travel around these United States makes me think of both the good and the bad. It is much easier to travel to distant places, in much less time than it used to take. That is not necessarily a good thing.

Once, many years ago, I lived in a very small town. The large majority of parents in that town told their children to go away to college, get a good job, and move away from the town where they were born. It was not as hard to accomplish that as it used to be, and so many children did that very thing. I pondered the potential ramifications of parents telling their children to invest in a town that they were not born in and thus abandon the town of their birth.

Imagine for a moment if every parent in small towns did this. In just a generation or two the small towns would dry up and disappear. Yuck. I say this not just because I like small towns, but also because big city life often has a gravely immoral influence on the people who live there. That is not the only thing that we need to be wary of though. Another detail of, "get a good job and move away" is that it breaks up the family. How many people do you know whose children all live within a short drive? There are not many, I would guess. I know many who do not have any children nearer than a full day's drive.

Are we dividing families out of some misguided sense of "you can do better"? Is the societal and spiritual damage that is being caused really worth a bigger paycheck? Just because those kids can fly back home in a matter of hours, does not make it ok to divide up the family like this. Yes, they can take a trip for a visit, but how often do those children who live hours away really visit back home? When they do, it (unavoidably) will have less depth than if they had lived nearby and been in each other's company more regularly. And thus, the means that God created for the furtherance of a righteous society, are once again cracked and broken in the name of modern progress. Sad.