Grass Always Greener

An Upstate New Yorker's Notes on Leaving

The “could” is a torturous thing. It may even be fair to say that for the man who prides himself in always staying one step ahead of misfortune — the “could” is quite often his end.

Consider it this way: imagine that you must pass two nights in two different cabins for some reason or other. In one cabin, you are to bunk with your own grandfather, and he’s brought with him some whiskey, a pistol, and a game of Scrabble. In the second cabin, you are bunking with a notorious criminal psychopath known for dismembering his victims, and he brings with him the same kit: whiskey, pistol, and a Scrabble game.

In which does the “could” loom large as an unnerving threat? And in which does the “could” look markedly more pleasant or even jolly?

It would not be fair to say that one’s nerves surrounding the night spent sleeping alongside an armed, possibly drunk, and totally sick and notorious killer would be unjustified. To be nervous about that night there would not be wrong, nor would it be neurotic, deluded, or unreasonable. Even if the man was good company overall; even if the two of you elected to play a rousing game of Scrabble, and even if in so doing he was completely genteel or even funny — your fear would not be about what will happen, but what could happen.

Because of the “could,” it is doubtful you would get a wink of sleep. Nobody in their right mind would; any thinking person would be rather afraid to let their guard down around one who is known for dismembering his victims — particularly when you are locked in close quarters with him when he is armed. To let your guard down around this person would be dangerous, and not because of anything approaching a certainty — but only because of the risk.

Conversely, the night passed with grandpa would be completely different. Depending on what sort of a fellow your grandfather is, the night could range from awkward at the worst to, at the very best, a memorable evening spent bonding with beloved old grandpa. The whiskey is no threat here; the two of you could drink it or, if teetotaling, it could simply be there — inert, harmless, a presence one barely considers.

Quite the same with the gun. It is entirely likely that for the vast majority of those who’ll read this essay, their grandfathers are either responsible and trustworthy men of a sort one would always trust with a firearm — or they are skeptics of firearm culture who would not touch the gun anyhow. In either case, it is not a dangerous presence; one is not tortured by fears of some ill fate coming to pass, nor of any unforeseen shots in the dark. Consequently, it would not be so hard to sleep there — you’d get a far smoother night’s rest with grandpa than with a psychopathic killer.

Of course this all must seem completely obvious, and indeed, it is. But I highlight this difference only to make a broader remark upon the psychology of place. It is a kind of metaphor for the fifty US States and their respective counties, or, I suspect it could be applied well enough internationally, too. For example, a vacation in Pyongyang is markedly different from a vacation in Paris — again, not because of any great guarantee of what would occur in either city (it is not impossible to imagine having a wonderful time in Pyongyang and getting mugged in Paris) but because of the “could.” And reason would have it that the risk of vacationing in Pyongyang is, overall, wildly unfavorable as compared with that of taking a trip to Paris.

On the question of which US States we Americans choose to reside in, the calculus is not hardly different, albeit it is of a ‘softer’ variety. For example, for the one who has somehow come to conclude that the ability to legally smoke marijuana and to get an abortion are sacrosanct rights without which one is oppressed or ensnared in a theocratic hellscape — a life in Texas or Kentucky would appear to be a dreadful and unnerving prospect. And no doubt, a quick perusal of Reddit shows that a startlingly large proportion of far-left-leaning Millennials and Zoomers from those states are making great efforts at leaving them, often at great personal cost.

Contrariwise, there are many others who are from states like Illinois, New Jersey, and New York who find themselves fed up with what may really be some of the highest property tax rates in the modern world. They make note of Byzantine procedures surrounding firearm ownership, or building codes, or zoning laws — that do altogether make what they consider to be an essentially American life nigh impossible. After one notes they pay the full value of their home back to the state every 10 or 15 years, applies for a pistol permit doled out by Soviet-esque officials who demand things like “character witnesses” and “just cause” for the exercise of one’s second amendment rights, or after finding that basic freedoms like homeschooling or building a house are niggled down to nothing by arcane and obscure laws that even the enforcers themselves can’t seem to understand — they become unnerved, just as if they were trapped in a cabin with an armed psychopath, and may decide to leave.

Such people appear to be moving across state lines at numbers that may exceed those of their liberal counterparts. Judging by the “empty” or “deadened” character of so much of rural Upstate New York, or downstate Illinois — it seems rather apparent that leaving is the most popular pastime in so many of those states’ counties.

Whether one leaves a state over their alleged “right” to an abortion or over things like taxes and gun rights — we see people so deeply disturbed by the fearsome “could” that they’re even willing to pull up the stakes and uproot themselves from family and familiarity both. They observe the legal climate, hold up what they see of it against their own convictions, and find that the risk of finding themselves mired in a worsening situation is so serious that they must take direct action swiftly, even at great personal cost.

Is such behavior ever well-reasoned and just? Does it chiefly stem from partisan neuroticism — or is it that, at times and in the course of American life, one must really “vote with their feet?”

As a matter of principle it seems to go without saying that there are times when this kind of arithmetic and its subsequent results are completely justified. Was the dissident in Soviet Russia wrong to risk life and limb to escape the brutal regime that had taken root in his country? I doubt any thinking person could ever say so. Or is the migrant refugee wrong to flee whatever grim scenario is taking place in his home? In similar fashion, many would not say that it is. Therefore, this particular genre of mobility is baked into our conception of place at at least some level.

Yet, right alongside this basic understanding, we are just the same taken with repeating proverbs about how “the grass is always greener on the other side” or “wherever you go, there you are.” These are, to be sure, quite fair pearls of wisdom to circulate — it is true that moving house will not bring about a utopia, nor will it solve addictions, personality disorders, health problems, financial woes, or the fall of mankind in the garden. And so insofar as one’s grievances with a place stem wholly from the domain of the personal, and the desire for a change of place appears to be imbued with a salvific quality — the ‘leaver’ may, in these cases, set himself up for disappointment or new failures.

Juggling between these two heuristics regarding leaving is not as straightforward as it would seem. I think, for example, of some old classmates of mine from college. As a seventeen-year-old, I enrolled in the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in the “EOP” program. EOP stood for “Educational Opportunity Program” — a kind of acronymic euphemism for “the really poor kids with substantial scholarships.” All of us were from high-poverty areas, all of us were the first in our families to attend college, and almost all of us arrived at the pre-collegiate summer program with at least a few serious academic deficiencies, bad habits, and wrongheaded notions about the purpose of college.

The summer program sought to correct these, and was a measure taken to increase the odds that we’d graduate. Moreover, it created a sort of “pipeline” for kids from poor areas of NYS to come to a more prosperous, thriving little city far from each of our old problems — and indeed, 98% of my EOP classmates were from blighted urban areas. They grew up in Yonkers, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Washington Heights, Newburgh, and so on — and in fact, I was the only white person in the program. It was my first exposure to black people, Latinos, or any of the other types of people that as a kid, I really only ever saw on television — and all of them were from the worst ‘ghettos’ in New York State.

The only thing we had in common was that we each hearkened from zip codes with above-average household poverty rates — and had parents or guardians who were, at best, ‘working class’. Otherwise, their experience of ‘poverty’ was radically different from my own: they told ghastly stories of murdered cousins, hiding in metal bathtubs when gangs started shooting up their streets, mothers who prostituted themselves, and fathers in prison. Several had been to juvenile hall for various offenses — and one kid who had a stub of a forefinger claimed he “lost it in a brawl with a cop.” I never knew if it was true, but it struck me as a believable claim.

I learned very quickly what the value of getting out of the ghetto really was to those who called some of this state’s worst ‘hoods’ home. For many, it was life or death. The magnetism of the drugs was too intense; the “family business” paid too well for them to turn away from. Prison was discussed not as an accident or as an avoidable thing but as a given — an inevitability. The conditions of long-time family apartments were described as being appalling. Health problems were rampant, police beat-downs constant and brutal, and multi-generational cycles of welfare reliance (or fraud and abuse) were common to hear of.

At that time, I began to roll my eyes at the idea that “the grass [isn’t] greener on the other side.” For many of these kids — it was, beyond any reasonable doubt.

Yet “wherever you go, there you are” was nevertheless operational on all of us. Several of the students more or less immediately botched their opportunity by various drug arrests, assault charges, seasons of debauched partying, or flunking out from an abject lack of effort. Others did make it through — for one of my friends in the program, it took him ten years to complete his bachelor’s degree — only to feel trapped in Plattsburgh, or to struggle with rent back in NYC, or to idle at sub-par jobs for years on end. Though such people were no longer ducking shots on their home streets — some other, more ineffable thing held them back from contentment like a forcefield; a decidedly common fate for those who’ve grown up in dysfunctional or Dickensian conditions.

The most interesting element of these cases and their incumbent struggles was that they were more or less entirely non-ideological. The kids in EOP wouldn’t become inured to the mind-numbing ‘soma’ of political partisanship until later; none of them arrived with anything resembling a political consciousness of any kind. They may have carried a latent notion that Obama was “good,” but few of them could offer a defense of him other than the fact that “he’s black, like me.” Though this is understandable to a degree, and not entirely worthless — these ‘ghetto kids’ never seemed to conceive of their desire to “get out of the ghetto” in ideological terms. It was simply viewed as an absolute necessity, quite akin to breathing clean air.

When the “leaving” question begins to be tinged with ideological or political concerns, it is complexified substantially. For where the EOP kids — or for that matter, refugees, prisoners, or citizens of brutal and repressive regimes of any kind — sought escape from negative material conditions, the footloose ideologist often aims to leave in order to avoid anticipated negative material conditions. His decision to depart from a place with policies he believes could negatively impact him eventually is proactive; he is avoiding the risk of misfortunes that he has reason to believe “could” happen given the climate of how his state is being run. His calculations on this score may be rational and valid — or they may really stem from what Slavoj Zizek would call “pure ideology.” Parsing these is never straightforward.

Perhaps Proverbs 22:3 says it most clearly:

The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.

Even some nine centuries before the time of our Lord Jesus Christ, we see that the natural human tendency to assess danger and “take refuge” somewhere safer was well understood — even to the point of directly stating that those who fail to do this are “simple” and will “pay the penalty.”

Lately I am thinking of this verse — as this year, my property tax assessment doubled out of nowhere. A house I paid $33,000 for last year is now assessed at $72,000, and at a rate exceeding 3% of assessed value. This means I will pay the full market value of my house back to the county roughly every thirteen years. If I live to be 85, I will actually pay the county the full value of my home at least four times before I die. And that’s if the assessment does not rise again — which if everything I’ve observed about NYS property taxes is any guide, it certainly will.

For the dubious privilege of paying such a scandalous amount, what do I receive? A dilapidated town nestled in a vast, dying region, with a median age nearing sixty. Cracked-pavement roads, rainbow flags flying over the schools, invasive homeschooling requirements, Draconian gun laws, arcane building codes that nearly double the cost of building as compared with no-code jurisdictions elsewhere. Legions of cops (some of the most per-capita in the US) setting speed traps to generate still-more revenue — legalized euthanasia, protected abortion, solar farms forced onto productive cropland by plutocrats from Albany, whole milk banned in the schools.

Even now, the NYS Department of Community and Family Services is actually deliberating as to whether denying “gender-affirming care” is a form of medical neglect — and whether they can take a parent’s children and put them in foster care if this “treatment” is denied. All of this is only a cursory view of the situation here; if I listed the number of grievances I have against the State of New York I would run out of room quickly.

Moreover, the sum total of these pointless indignities and obscenities seems to have demoralized the population here. Young people leave at high rates; any sense of community that does not hinge entirely upon those who will be dead on the other side of the decade is nearly impossible to find. The great majority of those who stay are deeply aggrieved by living in a place where, as some have said it, “everything I want to do is illegal.” Even the enforcers of the bizarre laws passed at the state capital are cynical; enforcement is often lopsided or targeted — or even driven purely by personal vendettas or abject mismanagement of office.

As one survivor of the Yugoslav Wars told me at a grocery store in Utica some years ago — “I had thought the nightmare was over in 1991, and I was wrong then. Then I came to Utica and I thought the nightmare was definitely over. But I see I was wrong there, too.”

What we find is a kind of “hostage situation” for so many Upstate New Yorkers; whereby three major factors entrap them here in spite of their profound and often crippling disgruntlement with living without political representation in a state that is run by NYC and its cronies:

1. Family ties. For many, ‘family is everything’ and their family is here. These are the types of people who, had they grown up in Russia, might’ve tried to dissuade their children from fleeing the country in 1917.

2. Financial realities. With resale values as low as they are in this state’s rural regions — the idea of selling and having enough to move elsewhere is basically unthinkable, particularly if your wages are already low.

3. Inertia. What “home” is is akin to a large diesel engine that, once running, is not easy to shut down. Many Upstaters never travel, or are not aware of quite how depressing our state often is. Like fish to water, it simply may not occur to them that life is easier or that people really are happier elsewhere.

For a very small minority, there is a fourth factor — and this one has been, in particular, my own Achilles’ heel:

4. Deep love of place combined with a “never retreat” mentality. The one who adores the land here (and it is truly magnificent) may choose to ignore the politics, and may make his peace with both the odious taxes and the crumbling social reality here; he may moreover argue that only a coward leaves his homeland, that he should “stay and fight” — but whatever “fighting” looks like, he usually does not know.

Each of these seems to negate the “could” somehow; each seems to lead the one who “sees danger” to blithely ignore it, and to resolutely hang on. I find that as time goes on, for many this process of hanging on only gets more difficult as time goes on. Just as the weight towed by a tractor in a tractor pull gets heavier and heavier as it is pulled — so too with the Upstate New Yorker’s own burden. For as family ties weaken (and they seem to weaken as a matter of course here), one knot loosens. Should monetary realities turn in favor of fortune, another tie unravels. Eventually, the only things keeping a man here may be of an essentially intellectual nature — for he knows that by force of will inertia can be overcome; and he goes back and forth on the efficacy of “staying and fighting.”

And here, the “could” impacts him in another way. Rather than the negative coulds — that if he should need to, God forbid, discharge a firearm to protect his family, that a liberal D.A. could jail him, or that his tax assessment could double again — the positive coulds start wandering through his mind. His family, for example, could abandon the turmoil, choose to behave as a family might again; it could be that the state turns things around, that better policies come around, that the taxes actually go lower rather than higher…

Each of these seems like a dubious pipe-dream, and yet the fantasies sustain something in him. The ‘staying-urge’ consumes them; these dreams are the only nourishment that that urge receives. The climate, the state, the tax-man, the culture, sometimes the family — none of it appears to feed that urge, none of it ever seems to straighten up and offer anything like an optimistic view of the future here. And so, like the one who limps through his dead-end life by so many television shows and lottery tickets — all of which are fake and he knows it — the ‘stayer’ here in Upstate NY feeds himself with little fantasies every bit as phony as those offered by the TV and the casino.

Those who are from elsewhere may find all of this sort of thing to be decidedly cynical — those who are from here and places like it will usually understand. Though we do have a minority of residents here who take a far more positive view of this place, such people tend to either be wealthy, retired, or are state workers. And of those with a positive view of this place who are not any of these — they appear to be a minority of scattered enthusiasts operating mostly in isolation, or else have grown up in the lucky few towns that have not completely died back into a husk of what they once were.

Perhaps because my own hometown has died in exactly that fashion — and is now unrecognizable to me — I am particularly prone to being unmoored from this place. It would be fair to say this, and I recognize my own bias on that score. Nevertheless, I do not think I am wrong to speak on this matter as I have here; practically everywhere I go in NYS, I see an almost endless stream of disgruntlement — and where I have generally made it my industry to blithely insist that things are not so bad as the naysayers claim, I must admit that this is a deeply trying and difficult place to live.

Then again, America was built by those who deliberately sought out to live in “trying and difficult” places, no? Those words would indeed describe the life of the frontier quite aptly. Why, then, could Upstate NY not simply be another “new frontier?” This has been my line of reasoning for some years now, and I do not think the idea came about vainly or without reason. Extremely cheap housing, poorly-enforced laws, rich land, and relative proximity to places of substantial cultural import (such as New York City and Montreal) seemed to make it the perfect proving ground for a new American vision.

My precise ambition here was to provoke a kind of Renaissance for the rural hinterlands; an answer for those fed up with sky-high housing costs elsewhere — a Haven for lovers of frugality and collectivity and nature and faith; a place for time-rich oddballs to congregate. Perhaps it could still be that — perhaps I have not yet gone far enough.

But one key respect in which this place is not frontier-esque in the slightest is in the law and in the tax codes. No westward-bound sodbuster paid the full value of his home back to the state every thirteen years. No fur trapper in Oregon Territory pulled a permit for his camp cabin — nor was a farmer of the old times ever cited for an illicit outhouse.

Part of what made America great was that formerly, one really owned their property; the notion that a free-born citizen would have to ask permission to use his own property how he wished was foreign to this country for generations. Those were the generations during which the greatest ‘bones’ of this country were ever built. The men of such times would find it hard to believe that all along, they were only working for a future where people would be literally taxed out of their own homes — with nary an ounce of recourse or representation. One wonders if they wouldn’t have built any of this country to begin with if they could’ve seen the future.

These days, though New York has an uncanny amount in common with frontiers — namely, the cheap, fertile land — it seems that each of those commonalities is directly countered by some respect in which New York is now the ultimate anti-frontier. Living here, one feels a strange admixture of feelings: at once, you are as lonesome as if you were on a frontier — yet with Albany looming over you, and the tax bills piling up in the mailbox, you get that eerie feeling you might feel if sleeping beside a drunken, armed psychopath. He is a dangerous man; he seems to hate you. It seems to be only a matter of time before he destroys you. After all, he could — and it is that exact kind of possibility that ever drove men to the real frontier in the first place.

And so I am led to wonder if I have made an error with regards to my home state. After all, there is still land as cheap as that of Upstate New York’s elsewhere in the country — and in states where the tax bill on a house like mine might be about $100/yr. States where I can, like an American, buy a pistol and keep it in my coat to protect my family — and where, like an American, I can buy land and do with it what I please, without asking father for permission. Such places still do exist, and I cannot tell you what it would do for a man’s nerves to live in such a place.

Perhaps it is all an illusion or a sham; perhaps I am only riding the high clouds of “pure ideology” and a neurotic pining for a kind of freedom that was slaughtered nationwide long ago. But I have seen enough of the Louisiana swamps and the Chihuahuan Desert and the Appalachian Range to know that there are places far freer than here, so far as I could ever tell; one wonders if any of them will last into my old age, or if what is happening now in New York State is only a portrait of our nationwide future.

To this, some will say that one must “bloom where they’re planted,” and I do suppose there is some wisdom there. Yet can one bloom if the tax-man comes to cut the blooms away once a year? What if he comes also to cut away the leaves, or to take away the soil and the sunlight? Can one bloom if blooming is itself made illicit — a citable offense? Or — what of the one who blooms alone, unseen, without friends?

It is all too much for me to answer today. I cannot say whether I will really leave New York State, or whether ‘thinking about leaving New York’ is merely an essential part of living here. It isn’t as if I haven’t already left, either — I’ve spent the better part of my adult life away from here. None would be shocked if I departed for good, though some would be saddened. Then again, if our daughter would be better off for it, this increase in her circumstances might outweigh whatever grief is generated by our departure — the father in me says it would. But for now, there is no answer; only an open inquiry.

All I will say is that from the view from here, the grass certainly does look greener — and seeing as I have traveled enough to have actually seen and felt that grass, I do know that it is greener. It will only do to stay here if indeed I am a true masochist — one who thrives on paying triple the price for inferior grass. Perhaps there is something edifying there; perhaps it is laudable to force oneself to somehow bloom in an absolute wasteland, where few others manage to do anything but “bloom” in a manner hardly different from how plastic flowers bloom. Perhaps it is a kind of madman’s bargain — a feverish deal with the darkness, a wager so absurd that the only one who’d win it is the one who has emptied himself out completely first.

There is no way for me to know, and so for now, I will only sit with it like an old friend. Doubtless, that old friend is not merely in my house lately, but in the houses of countless others who, through gritted teeth, call this place “home,” too. For all of us, Alaska is a fantasy — West Virginia, Arizona, Texas: they are like cartoon characters in a show so magical it lifts us out of our darkness until the rust and taxes re-appear in our veins again. Whether they are real or not is not in question — it’s whether we are better there or not that is. May God help me.