“Thank God no one let me write newspaper columns when I was 22.”
I said this flippantly to another journalist last week as I was telling them I was writing newspaper columns for the first time in my career. It was not so much a joke as an older man looking back on his younger self with clarity.
At 22, I did not have any striking insights to offer the world.
While I could string words and sentences together well enough to make interesting paragraphs, I only had a dim understanding of the world, mostly through second-hand information: through reading newspapers, magazines, and books. Plus, my experience up to then did not lend itself to great storytelling. My life had revolved around other affluent White people living in gated communities in the Deep South, a very particular geographical, socioeconomic bubble.
I didn’t possess the imaginative power to transform a life of relative ease into a compelling drama. Nor had my understanding of the world been punctured by a diverse set of people who could challenge my deepest-held assumptions by drawing on their own lived experiences to come up with competing theories on how the world worked.
The epiphany that I had grown up in a bubble would take years to sink in, and only after I had lived around the country and married a child of Mexican immigrants whose tales of growing up were so foreign to me that her experiences genuinely shocked me. By this time, thanks to journalism, I had already met people of different races and ethnicities, from all walks of life and socio-economic situations, disparate faith traditions, including quite a few people who’d been born outside the U.S.
I am not saying the only way to become more self-aware people must live elsewhere from where they grew up, or become a journalist or have a diverse personal network, although I believe all can help. Only that these experiences have helped me understand myself better — as well as the world in which we all live, which is wondrously and frustratingly complicated.
I think about this as I ruminate on our nation’s polarized politics and the fraying it has done to the bonds that hold us together as a country. Daily, it seems the tribalism that pits Americans against each other tightens its grip on us. And I wonder if a small factor in this scenario has to do with Americans’ decreasing desire to live far from where they grew up, which, in turn, makes them more prone to be wary of people who might have grown up differently than they did, at least when it comes to politics.
Researchers in the U.S. Census Bureau and Harvard University found in 2022 that nearly six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up, and eight in 10 live within 100 miles. And in a marked difference from previous eras when a large portion of the American population moved regularly, new data showed that fewer than 10% of Americans moved in the annual period that ended in March 2024, the first time the figure had dropped below 10% since 1947, when the Census Bureau began tracking that figure.
I’m not saying that moving around would lance the fever of political polarization sickening our society. Or that moving is even practical for many Americans. It is expensive, and it is hard.
Honestly, I don’t know how to solve the sickness infecting our country.
But moving around and meeting new people from different circumstances and disparate worldviews, has made me more open to individuals who on first impression share nothing in common with me while making me more suspicious of people who decry that differentness is dangerous.
For that reason, I resonate much more with people who understand that in a society of 320 million people from all walks of life, belief systems and lived experiences that getting to know people in the messiness of their lives, which inevitably happens when you move around, might help us more than fighting from afar on social media or always sticking with our own kind.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.