There’s a line in a Jimmy Eat World song that goes something like this:

“I’m not alone ‘cause the TV’s on, yeah,
I’m not crazy ‘cause I take the right pills, every day.”

I’m finding that I watch a lot more TV in the mornings these days. Ostensibly it is to watch the weather report. But even though I hate hearing about the latest murder and mayhem in the Metro Louisville area, there is something to what Jimmy Eat World says. The perky voice of the weatherman echoes through my empty apartment, and I’m not alone.

I grew up in a small town close to Leavenworth, Washington. I know it wasn’t nearly as idyllic as my retrospective imagination paints it out to be—like every clique, there were the insiders and the outsiders. But we did have community in Leavenworth. Whether it was AAU basketball or Friday night football, drama productions or community chili feeds, one knew people. It didn’t surprise me, when my dad passed away, that a few hundred mourners from up and down the Wenatchee Valley showed up at his funeral.

Where are the kids that grew up in Leavenworth now? I’m in Louisville, Kentucky. Krysten just bought a house in St. Paul, Minnesota. Colin is somewhere in Arizona. Casey spent a year in San Antonio, Texas before returning to Seattle. A few are still in our hometown, raising kids of their own now. But we are the diaspora, the community that left to go to college and never returned.

And we find other “diasporas”—young men and women like us, students or young professionals, from small towns in Tennessee and Texas and Oklahoma. We sit together at the lunch table, or chill at restaurants or bars on the weekends. Sometimes, I think we come together just to escape the weatherman’s voice. Or maybe we’re all searching for our own small town Americas.

We talk a lot about the effects of globalization abroad, in some country in Asia or Latin America. I rarely hear a discussion about what globalization means for young American adults. Though technology helps us maintain community circles over thousands of miles, a global economy means that good jobs aren’t where we live. They aren’t with our families and in our communities. How can I return to Dryden or Leavenworth? What possible work exists for me there? The best I can do is rebuild another community in some distant Babylon, only to watch those I care about flee somewhere else.

And I go to the house of God, searching for something eternal.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” --Revelation 22:13

Kelsey