> This is a part of modern life: You have to go where the jobs are.
There's a kind of unfairness in small communities creating safe and nurturing environments for families, educating children well, then waving farewell as their young adults move to a city far away. It's especially unfair if the young adults would just as soon stay in their hometowns given comparable opportunities.
That's why I'm happy my son is attending an urban high school.
He's part of the college track, where it's not uncommon for students to graduate and attend Ivies or other good universities.
But he also gets to interact with people across racial, religious, and socio-economic groups. So he won't freak out and be terrified to leave his insular, closed little community and experience the bigger world.
Whether or not something is fair is a subjective statement, and when stated like this it reads like nothing more than a veneer on entitlement.
At the end of the day, "fairness" is a quaint ideal held by people that wish that power structures were different than they are. Life is not fair; it is ruled by politics, power and leverage in a Hobbesian fashion. While I enjoy urban living, I did not choose to play the emigrate-everywhere version of "modern life". I did what I needed to because the economics of the situation demanded it.
This is why the rural complaint rings hollow to me. The economy decides where you go and what you do, not some suburban ideal.
I was pointing out that there's a tragedy of the commons when small communities pour resources into the youth without reaping the benefits (fewer educated, driven, and ambitious community members).
Also, if calling it unfair is subjective, so is calling it fair. Urban areas could just as easily be the entitled ones in this narrative. There is concern about ethical trade when buying goods from third world countries, but there is no concern when swaths of Appalachia and the Upper Midwest resemble a third world country in many respects. We have cosmopolitan types fretting about Whole Foods exporting the entire Andean quinoa crop, leaving locals little to eat. But there isn't similar concern about whether American towns are being likewise exploited.
There's a kind of unfairness in small communities creating safe and nurturing environments for families, educating children well, then waving farewell as their young adults move to a city far away. It's especially unfair if the young adults would just as soon stay in their hometowns given comparable opportunities.