This winter, Shawna and I have been lucky enough to be able to "make the rounds" and visit several clusters of family that are scattered across the northwest. In December alone we've visited:

   * Shawna's dad at the WA coast

   * My dad and stepmom in Three Forks, MT

   * My sister and aunts, uncles, and cousins in Dillon, MT

   * Walla Walla, WA to see Shawna's mom and cousin

   * Burbank, WA to visit my mom and stepdad.

 

I can't tell you how great it was to be able to see, laugh with, and hug such a wide swath of family, especially so close to Christmas. However, it did underline a complaint that Shawna quickly noted when she first arrived here from South Korea: America is TOO DAMN BIG.

 

My family is almost exclusively contained within three neighboring US states, yet they're still so far away that we only get to see some of them once or twice each year (it's a 10-hour drive to see my dad!). Shawna never had that sort of problem in Korea, and after a little research to compare stats between South Korea and the USA, it was fairly easy to understand why.

 

Even though South Korea is home to 49 million people, it's only half the land mass of Washington state. That might sound like a lot of people crammed into a tiny space, but when I visited it certainly didn't feel over-crowded or congested. The bottom line is that when a South Korean visits their family anywhere else in South Korea, it takes no more than a few hours.

 

Since the combined population of Montana, Washington and Idaho is a fraction of South Korea's, we could round up everybody living in those states and plop them into western Washington and we'd still have plenty of breathing room. We'd be a short jaunt from most everybody we know and we'd see each other all the time. We could have dinner with our parents on a whim, and the entire family would get together many times each year just for the heck of it. Wouldn't that be amazing?

 

But alas, that's not the way things are and so we still have three states and four mountain passes between Redmond and Three Forks. Some folks say the recent "erosion of family values" is due to things like working mothers, same-sex marriages, and rock n' roll, but I think it might be a lot simpler than that. Maybe it's because families are increasingly spread across the 3.7 million square miles of the USA, which makes it hard to get together for more than a handful of events in a decade. Maybe it's because America is TOO DAMN BIG!

 

Just some food for thought... please enjoy with a large helping of those Christmas dinner leftovers (yummmm)!

 

- Jas