New Hampshire Girl of the Week

I don't usually do this sort of thing, and in the end I am not going to link to the page now, but the germ of this post came when I was doing one of my games where I do a search using random words looking for a place to go to lunch and a picture of a somewhat tough-looking but attractive woman, who is of a type that one frequently encounters in these parts, came up. So I clicked on the story and, sure enough, she lived about twenty miles from me in one of the lake towns that I end up in once a month or so. As it happened, she was being featured on a site that was mocking people for having frivolous GoFundMe campaigns. While this aspect was more sad than anything else, I was drawn in by the extensive documentation of how her life, and the lives of seemingly everyone she associated with, were such absolute train wrecks. Children by multiple fathers, drug arrests, domestic violence arrests, rehab, no one having a job, social workers taking the children away, etc, etc. This is not atypical of a large swathe of the population in many of the towns around here, though they are not, or at least don't seem to me to be, as hopelessly dreary and depressing as the hollowed out towns of the rust belt. They are minor tourist centers and have a lot of vacation homes, though I suppose the year round local population is a little underprivileged; still I do not feel uncomfortable or even particularly out of place going to most places in these towns. Perhaps it is further evidence of how my own expectations for myself, and my conception of the world that I personally inhabit, continue to shrink and shrink. I checked out a travel book on Chicago from the library last week, one of those Insight Guides with glossy bright pictures on every page, not merely of the sights, but of the paneled lobbies of impossibly expensive hotels, the sleek dining rooms of trendy restaurants, and gorgeous retro bars in renovated packing houses. But when am I ever going to have a week, or even four or five days, to go to Chicago and do any of these things? And that is just Chicago, not Spain or Berlin, or heaven forfend, Singapore or Tokyo or Nairobi or Dubai. Within a few years I'll probably be grateful if I can still go to the coastline that's a hour away a couple of times a year.


New Hampshire was featured recently (at the time I started writing this, which was about a month ago) in a New York Times article that got some attention about how the state, or some of its business leaders anyway, are seeking to attract more diverse people--evidently a lot more--to move here, mainly for the sake of the economy, of course, which, while not currently that bad by many measures--highest household income in the country, lowest poverty rate, 2% unemployment, etc--is facing some demographic problems in the coming years, and, perhaps more pressingly does not as currently constituted appear to allow as many opportunities for the ongoing accumulation of the kinds of massive fortunes that are available in other places. Naturally several people here have already commented on this article on various internet platforms, and a few have already gotten in trouble for it, so perhaps it is not really worthwhile for me, with my readership of eight people, or maybe 8 robots for that matter, to risk writing anything that is not in the correct spirit and be exiled to what a commenter on another site referred to as "the gulag of low-wage employment". But seeing as I do not actually have an agenda to push either of my own or on behalf of someone else, what would be the point of just reiterating all of the points on either the good or evil side of the issue that everyone is expected to reiterate once they have established which side they have chosen to be on? I have never persuaded anyone to do anything that I am aware of in the whole of my life, so what is going to happen is largely going to happen in spite of anything I say or do.

In the first place it is inevitable short of dramatic and unpalatable measures that I don't foresee happening that the state is going to grow somewhat more diverse in the coming years. It can scarcely grow less diverse, and there aren't enough younger white people either among the current population or in the pool of potential migrants to replace the older people, almost all of whom are white, who are going to pass on in the next twenty years. To what extent this happens, or how noticeable it is going to be, remains to be seen, obviously. I was surprised to read in one of the local newspapers commenting on the New York Times piece that in the school systems in Manchester and Nashua already something like 45% of the students are minorities. I don't have much occasion to go to Nashua, but I am in Manchester a couple of times a month and as an adult at least I don't get much sense of the presence, yet, of a minority or immigrant population anywhere close to this size, and the character of the city still seems much like it has always been, though admittedly trending older.

As is usual in these kinds of articles, the talent conundrum/shortage that hangs over every discussion involving professional politicians and business interests rears its head. In some ways New Hampshire perhaps would seem to be comparatively well-positioned in the global battle for talent and human capital, apart I suppose from having insufficient numbers, especially of younger people. The violent crime rate I believe is now the lowest of any state and its school test scores are usually in the top three in the country; if it were an independent nation it would rank in the top tier of countries I think, just behind the usual east Asian states and Finland. Of course I have learned over the years that when politicians and businessmen talk about attracting Talent they have something much more spectacular in mind than generally functional Americans of perhaps slightly above the middle rank (such as myself and my children). As with all classes of people who are highly coveted, whether by schools, cities, professions, businesses seeking customers, for the purposes either of increasing/maintaining their wealth/status, or more pitifully, as a desperate ploy for survival, there are not close to being enough of these desired souls to support more than a handful of these communities, since the best sorts tend to like to cluster together in superplaces. I don't pretend to know how competitive New Hampshire can be in this game. I suspect ultimately not very. As a place to live year round, the weather is very rough. I don't mind it, except for March and sometimes April, which psychologically wear on one, and autumn, while beautiful, is effectively over by October 20, which is a bit early--I grew up in the Mid-Atlantic, where Halloween occurs at the height of the beautiful crisp fall weather, but here it is often decidedly cold, not to mention black dark by 5 in the afternoon. The weather in Boston is admittedly dreary as well (which most of the Talent that has had to relocate there complains about endlessly), but it is even worse, or at least colder, here, and the well-known cultural and historic reasons that make Boston an important city do not seem to apply either.


One of the people interviewed for the New York Times article was a social worker who seemed to be advocating for an increase in immigrants who were likely to require a lot of services, improved public transportation options, affordable housing, and the like. Aside from racial issues this in itself would be a major cultural departure for New Hampshire, which even today is less than keen on levying taxes or funding schools or parks or providing services beyond the minimal amount required to maintain a functioning state. It is only within the last few years that we have gotten garbage pick up in my town--before that we had to haul all of our trash and recycling to the city dump ourselves--and even for that we have to put all of the garbage in special bags that cost $2.50 apiece or they won't take them. All of this stinginess heretofore has had the effect of not making the state particularly attractive to needy people. While of course there are a decent number of needy people who are homegrown they really do not overwhelm the schools, hospitals, prisons, etc compared to other places in this country. Whenever I return to my home state of Pennsylvania nowadays, especially when you get out of the nicer parts of the Philadelphia metro area, the roads and towns are increasingly reminiscent of Russia rather than the heartland of industrial age America. It is very sad, for me. It is frequently emphasized in the media that in many of these hollowed out and depopulating towns immigrants are propping up whatever is left in them that bears a resemblance to life, which is fine, though somewhat misleading, as Reading, Hazelton, Wilkes-Barre and their ilk are obviously not the kinds of places that people who are at all educated, or even imagine themselves to be educated, would consider acceptable to live in, being full of residents who are by middle class standards shockingly poor, have shockingly low test scores and employment prospects, and have astoundingly high rates of incarceration among their citizenry. And seemingly more and more of America is becoming like this, with seemingly little prospect of imminent improvement. But perhaps this impression is wrong, and they are not really very different from where I live, which I regard as still somewhat pleasant, generally functional, not yet impossibly expensive and that still has some degree of civic spirit, if not comparative to the 1940s and 50s then at least to similar sized cities in the present day. Perhaps these other formerly, or presently, All-American type cities have not fallen into this dismal state, or perhaps ours has but I have not even realized it because I am not fixated on the right things. Perhaps these changes are inevitable like they say, and they will be more wonderful than anything I could ever have imagined, though I still feel the urge to try to impress on my children that if you have been gifted with any degree of brains, you have got more than ever to make sure you develop them enough to give yourself a life that is tolerable to you, and not live perpetually in an atmosphere of squalor, hopelessness and intellectual torpor, because regardless of all the optimism and cheerleading, there is clearly a lot of that all over the place, and the means of escaping from the totality of it seem to have become more difficult than it used to be. I don't think the children grasp what I am saying at all though, and maybe that is for the good.