In the movie Doctor Zhivago, Yuri Zhivago and his beleaguered family hunker down in post-revolutionary Moscow, hoping to survive the winter.
Yevgraf, Yuri's half-brother, appears unexpectedly and urges Yuri to take his family and leave Moscow. If you stay in the city, Yevgrav warns, "you won't survive the winter."
Urban Americans, particularly those residing in Blue-State cities, are heading south. Unlike Doctor Zhivago's family, they are not fleeing starvation. Nevertheless, they have urgent reasons for leaving.
Urban crime, high taxes, poor schools, and corrupt municipal politicians are driving northern city dwellers to relocate to the south, where the weather is more pleasant and life is more serene.
I drove to St. Augustine, Florida, last week, the oldest town in the United States. As I crossed the state border east of Pensacola, I saw a sign that read, "Welcome to the Free State of Florida."
Over the next few days, I heard several stories about people who left northern cities for Florida. I got tired of shoveling snow, one New Yorker explained. A Chicago woman said her family moved to Florida to escape crime. Chicagoans had taken to coasting through stop signs, she confided, to avoid being carjacked.
Another family sold their multi-million-dollar Chicago home to settle in Wisconsin. Crime, outrageous property taxes, and a poor environment for raising children were some of the reasons for abandoning the Windy City.
Die-hard urban dwellers say the crime problem is exaggerated. More than three million people ride the New York subways every day, they point out, so they must feel safe. Yet a homeless woman was set afire while sleeping on a subway train last year, and a man was arrested a few months ago for sexually molesting a corpse on the R train in Manhattan.
How many instances of urban mayhem and murder does it take before people ask themselves whether there is a better place to live?
Millions of Americans are saying, "Enough is enough." New York, Illinois, and helter-skelter California are losing population as working families move to saner environments. Texas and Florida have been the largest beneficiaries, but other Southern states, such as North Carolina and Georgia, are also attracting people.
In the years to come, this mass migration of working families is expected to accelerate, and the cultural divide between Red states and Blue states will become more pronounced. For now, the Blue State politicians are taking a pugnacious stance. New York Governor Kathy Hochul went so far as to cheer her state's outflow of disaffected New Yorkers. "Get out of town," she jeered.
The day is coming, however, when even the Blue States' clueless politicians will want working Americans to return, along with their "youthful energy." After all, a society made up of shoplifters, homeless people, and wealthy progressives is not a happy place to be.
