MARK SMITH MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

A week or so ago, our publisher, Marie Wujek, posed a suggestion: that getting a full-blown college here might serve to keep young people in town and train them for careers they can use right here.

The idea would be, in effect, to find ways to keep young people at home rather than watching them drift off to far-flung places like LA or Phoenix, or even Seattle or Denver, much less Las Vegas.

I have to pose a counter-question: Why would any young person want to stay here?

Really, there isn't much to this environment that would strike me as attractive for a young person just out of high school who wants to get ahead and find a career and a future.

Why on earth would the average post-teen want to hang around?

I just look around the office where I work and see people who by and large are from somewhere else, be it Alaska, Chicago, Philadelphia or Mississippi. Almost all strove to acquire and pursue their careers elsewhere until, for one of any number of reasons, they wound up here. Almost none was raised here.

Why would we expect the young population here to be any different?

How many kids in their teens really would jump at the chance to continue their education right here and then get a job right here?

They are, as hackneyed as this sounds, going to want to see the world, not just stay here through high school, then through college and then work their way into a home-grown career right here.

To be blunt, there aren't that many Hafens and Floyds here.

In any case, how many jobs are there likely to be here? I mean jobs that allow the holder to afford a house (present economy excluded) and raise a family. Wal-Mart? Home Depot? Really, unless you own the store or can pull down a union gig at the test site, there isn't much likelihood that you're going to find success in Pahrump.

Pahrump is going to lack a lot of the basics where high-flying businesses are concerned for quite a while. No airport, no rail line, no interstate and sure as hell no river or seaport. It is not the kind of place that makes an industrialist starry-eyed.

Yes, there are some good things on the near horizon. Aside from the naysayers who would find fault with the First Church of Jesus Himself if He announced His intention to return to be the pastor, the detention center offers significant hope for a better life.

But we need to remember, we're talking roughly 200-250 jobs, or the wherewithal for, say, 500 adults.

In a town of 40,000.

What has to be considered is the fact that, when one finds oneself in a career, along with the career comes inevitably the prospect of a better future somewhere else. I remember when, in my first slot as a young journalist -- oh, OK, I was already in my mid-thirties by then -- I suddenly realized that every community in the country could use a journalist. My horizons, which had seemed so dead, suddenly glistened and gleamed. And in six months I had moved 700 miles away to my next job on the ladder up.

You can bet on it, when someone ties into something with the prospect of real success, the prospect of moving to pursue that success comes with it.

All right, so what is the solution?

Pushing the kids into more classes right here won't make a big difference.

Personally, I believe strongly in encouraging kids to try new things in new places and make up their minds through their own experiences. In my own life, the very last thing I wanted was to be stuck at home and become what we called "one of the perennials." My friends and I wanted to see and do and enjoy new places and experiences, not the same old same old.

By the time I was 30, including the Army, I had lived in seven different places. The idea of staying at home through those years makes me shudder.

What might make a difference is the suggestion that, once the kids move along to Portland or Spokane or Santa Barbara, once they make their lives into a success and gain the ability to find their own way and raise their families, then they might just work their way around to thinking, "You know, I'd like to go back home and start a business there, where I grew up. I miss the old place..."