In the autumn of 2005, the President's Council on Bioethics reported that our aging society does not have the resources or the mechanisms to care for our elderly. The only way to cope with this problem, the report suggested, is to revive the bonds of family and community care. New York Times columnist David Brooks said the report "is a rebuke to the economic individualism of the right and to the moral individuualism of the left." So is "Crunchy Cons." To conserve the things we care most about, we must strenghten human relationships and move beyond the stale categories laid down by current political discourse.

Which is easily said, but not so easily done. I'm at the age now where this is becoming an issue for me. My dad is in his 70s, and starting to experience lots of health problems typical for the aging. It's not a serious problem yet, but I tell you, I am awfully glad that my sister and her family live across the street. The idea of him or my mom having to go to a nursing home before such was absolutely necessary is intolerable to me — and yet, I don't know how I could move down to Louisiana to care for him if that were necessary, because a) what would I do for gainful employment, given my fairly specialized line of work, and b) how could I justify uprooting my wife and kids from the life we've built for ourselves in Dallas — a life that includes her parents, who will have their own need for our help someday.

I was thinking about this the other day, and about how we all just expect nowadays that our kids will move away — sometimes hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. Can we sustain that kind of ethic? As much as I ballyhoo a sense of place and family obligation in the book, I chose to move away from my hometown to follow my vocation, and can't imagine not having had that freedom. Yet that freedom comes at a cost, as I'm now realizing as I contemplate my own parents' aging, and think about how it's going to feel when my boys are young men, and want to move away. I don't have any answers for resolving this tension, except to hope and pray that my sons want to live close to their mom and dad, and have the economic freedom to do so.