The real question is -- how do they perceive options available: minimum wage retail sales, join a branch of U.S. Military, family farm, or just hanging out with their friends who are in same situation.

Some, through their own entrepreneurial activities, see options for working from home or for business opportunities in their own community. Most however, are just glad to have found a good job somewhere, and “somewhere” usually isn’t Humboldt County even though leaving home isn’t what they really want.

The editor William Vitek says in his essay, Community And The Virtue Of Necessity, "What keeps a community together is inability of its members to leave, either because of dangers that lie outside community--a forbidding desert or an enemy clan, for example--or ties that lie within community--traditions, laws, fear of being cast out, rejected, or destroyed." In recent times that has been mitigated (or weakened) by technology: automobiles, telephones, outside investments, ties to state and federal assistance programs, but some people do not feel that they can ever leave and continue a constant cycle of struggling with finding a means for economic security.

For many of Humboldt County’s residents, their identities are heavily intertwined with their community. The importance placed on where they live and what keeps them there (other than “we can’t just move farm”) seems to be tranquility, natural beauty, perceived lack of crime, and most importantly, people and relationships.

To prevent loss of our productive population and slow death of many of Humboldt County’s smaller communities, as we’ve seen happen with all too many, we have an enormous responsibility to make this place matter enough for our young talented people to want to stay or return after attending college elsewhere. By garnering our connection to technological age and educating our youth about unlimited entrepreneurial possibilities technology offers, we provide opportunity and a mechanism for our youth to succeed. Having a job that makes use of skills acquired in college would be an important step in keeping them here and luring those who’ve left back home.