What makes brains circle drains?

JohnTsitrian over at the South Dakota Standard takes up a favorite state aphorism recently recited at a legislative cracker barrel.  It is, "if you don't like South Dakota, get out."  Cory Heidelberger's Dakota Free Press covered the latest outburst.

And that is exactly what many bright and talented people do. They leave when they get the opportunity.

Having been retired for a long time, I no longer have daily encounters with college students, but when I did, getting out of South Dakota was the prime goal for many of them.  They wanted to live and work some place where their educations and abilities were recognized and appreciated.  And for a time, their goals were the cause of an almost-war declared by state officials and leaders.

Northern State, where I worked, was primarily a teachers' college.  It was a successful one.  It excelled in teacher education, but over time gained a reputation for the strong programs in the subject matters that teachers teach.  Consequently, students in other disciplines found that it made  them competitive in many fields of endeavor.  

I recall writing letters of recommendation for students, not only to surrounding states, but in places as distant as California, Massachusetts, and Florida.  At one point, state officials and leaders were made aware that there was a migration of our strongest students from the state.  School principals and superintendents were finding it difficult to fill vacant teaching positions because so many candidates were taking jobs in other states.  They complained to the department of education and the regents that the state schools were not helping supply the best teachers.

A president of Northern State was called on the carpet because the school was advertising as part of its recruiting program its success at placing students out of state .  It was using the term "gateway institution" as a way of emphasizing that it provided a pathway to other places.  It appealed to students whose goal it was to get out of South Dakota.  The college president was severely rebuked by state officials for using the term.

The faculty was asked to help the administration address the matter of the brain drain, and our first task was to define just how serious the problem was.  With the help of some school districts, we found that there were two waves of outmigration in the state.  The first was when students graduated from high school and went out of state to college.  The second occurred at graduation from college when students who went to college in South Dakota left the state to take up their careers.  What we found was that the bright students were motivated early in their educations to set the goal of leaving South Dakota.  Programs such as special scholarships were established to lure bright students to stay in the state to go to college, but such efforts only delayed the point at which they would leave.

The students told us the reason for their goals to leave.  They aspired to live and work in circumstances not available in South Dakota.  The pay, particularly in education, was much better elsewhere.  And so were the commensurate working and living conditions.  Parents and teachers encouraged young people to seek productive and satisfying lives, and they sought such lives where they were available--wnich was seldom in South Dakota.  

One of the measures of a state that is used by market analysts to identify the attitudes that shape the intellectual environment within a state is to trace where prominent people choose to live when they retire or move out of state. Many retirees move because of the winter weather.  They join the migration from the Midwest in general to retirement communities in Florida, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, etc.  Winter in South Dakota can be confining.  And many move to where they have family, whatever the weather may be like.  But a significant number move to places where the culture is more sustaining.  Around the time I retired, a number of fellow retirees moved to Minnesota suburbs within an easy commute to the Twin Cities.  They sought a change in intellectual climate.   When one of them was queried about why he moved from South Dakota to a similar climate, he said, "My idea of retirement is not sitting in a boat on the world's biggest stock dam [referring to Lake Oahe] trying to catch the world's dullest fish, or blasting away at the world's dumbest game bird while trying to avoid getting shot by some of the world.s dumbest hunters."   He then cited the cultural opportunities of the Twin Cities and access to a huge university library where he could continue to participate in the work of his chosen profession in a more leisurely manner.  He did not endear himself to many South Dakotans.

Dedicated South Dakotans find it difficult to deal with the fact that some people find the state less than appealing and uplifting, and they get angry and hostile and tell those people to leave if they don't like it.  Then they get peevish when people do.  

Despite a climate that can reach the extremes of unpleasantness, the state has a variety of geographical features that make it interesting and stimulating.  Or at least, they could.  But the human environment countermands that potential.  While people blithely speak of South Dakota nice as a social characteristic, the dominant traits that pervade the state are small-mindedness, resentment, and often outright malice.  Those are the things that people of some knowledge, intelligence, and good will want to eliminate from their lives.  And so, they move on as soon as they can.

The degree of outmigration is given numbers in an article in The South Dakota Standard by attorney Jay Davis on the massive demographic shift that has taken place within the state during the last 50 years.  While two urban areas have experienced vigorous growth, outlying counties have experienced population losses up to 46 percent.  Brown County, where I reside, has about held its own since 1970, showing a population loss of only one percent.

But the loss of physical bodies is the outward sign of a loss of human interest.  I have written frequently that people who don't move their persons out of state often withdraw their participation in their communities.  I have noted this in South Dakota for many years.  Some civic and cultural organizations in which I once was active simply do not exist.  Veterans and fraternal organizations which once ran vital facilities in town have folded up and receded into the background.  

Josh Marshall of The Talking Points Memo writes about this despair and withdrawal on the national level:

 ...people...find the news so bad and toxic that they are trying to make a voluntary exit from the public sphere – withdraw into work, family, hobbies.

Both Jay Davis and Josh Marshall see the advent of Trump as the signal of the intellectual and moral deterioration that is changing the social and political direction of the country.  One political faction is behind legislation introduced throughout the country which is plotted to subsume the privacy and freedom of designated people and impose oppressive and punitive measures on them.  The South Dakota legislature has almost abandoned legislating to build the state to devote its efforts to repressive and punitive laws.

Donald Trump is the voice and the personification of the people who put him in office.  Their notion of making America great resides in an incompetent alleged businessman--six bankruptcies, who brags about groping women, a briber of women with whom he has cheated on his wife--a violation of law for which the lawyer he ordered to make the payments is in prison, and a prolific liar who has tallied over 16,000 lies in the conduct of his presidency.  His character was thoroughly revealed in the news and in the way he conducted himself at his rallies and public events.  There is no way his supporters could not know this.  He is what they want.

They represent what people who do leave South Dakota are  getting away from.  But now the malice and dishonesty that seethes beneath South Dakota nice is a national issue.  If there is no place to go, people withdraw and retreat into enclaves.  Even if Trump is voted out of office, the people who endorse dishonesty and corruption with malice toward all who don't will be with us.  It is government by the people and about half the people want national degeneracy.  It is not a matter of partisan politics.  It's a matter of moral choice.

Intelligent and honorable people would rather avoid the degenerate.  Brains and aspirations are circling the drain looking for some positive hope to grab onto before they are swept into the great American sewer.  Even churches are not a refuge from Trump's contaminants  which are as virulent as coronavirus and have the same effects.

During the impeachment trial, there was much quoting of the founders, especially from The Federalist Papers. They were invoked as sophistries to obscure the nefarious ways of Donald Trump.  But our current times make the revolutionary words of Thomas Paine more relevant, as he wrote "These are the times that try men's souls." He offers some words to grab onto:

~It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance.

 ~That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.

~We have it in our power to begin the world over again.