If they gave you money, would you leave?

There is a story in the paper today about the relocation program underway in Siberia, where the Russian government pays residents of cities north of the Arctic Circle to pack their belongings and move south (apparently it’s too expensive to support cities where things basically stay frozen year-round). You’d think that with the constant agony of frost bite and the dreary months of severe light deprivation, most would catch the first plane out (there are no rail or road connections from there to the rest of Russia). But no: in one city (Norilsk), out of 20,000 eligible for the relocation program, only 48 have agreed to go.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. I suppose people don’t like giving up on their communities. Maybe they come to feel a sense of pride for managing life in a dump. And they sing songs and write poems about their squalid, colorless, polluted towns, so that people listening elsewhere begin to think that maybe they should go visit that special little piece of heaven. On a cross-country road trip in the 60s, I made my parents detour to Gary, Indiana because I had just seen the Music Man (“there is just one place, that can light my face..”).

Perhaps we, as a nation with the greatest mobility factor in the world (I just made that up, but I’m sure it’s true), cannot fully appreciate how people elsewhere might be rooted to their landscape. If they gave us money here, in the States --enough money to make it worth our while, most of us WOULD move. One could probably empty out all of Wisconsin within a year for the right price. North Dakota? Less than 6 months. True, in Norilsk the government is not dishing out enough cash to whet the appetite. But still, out of the targeted 20,000, I bet at least 15,000 kind of like the place.