The mortality rate is dropping among all groups except for one. that one is non college educated white men. The high rate of suicide, drug addiction, and inadequate access to medical care. The public news servers and the governors talk with great concern about Oxycontin and heroine, but you can make your own meth and I don’t think it’s gone away.
Milton Friedman and the heartless market. Tariffs are gone. Bain industries and a thousand other heartless wall street and industrial giants buy up companies and “slim them down” so they are lean and mean. A thousand people are fired. then ten thousand, remember Michael Moore’s First movie, “Roger and me?” That was about the closing of plants in Michigan. White people lost their jobs. So did black people. Among them people were managers and inspectors and secretaries.
Secretaries. that brings me to technology. computers. No one needs a secretary or for that matter a court reporter. anymore because spell check, recorders, because videos. Assembly line workers replaces by big smart manufacturing machines. You can probably three D print a car and have it functioning in the time it takes to make a human in West World. You think I’m kidding, one of my daughters’ former boyfriends worked for a startup that manufactured testing equipment for one of the private space explorer companies. A three D printer made the testing equipment.
Which brings me to women. Here is what fills the lives of women: their families, their men, their husbands, their providers and mainstays losing their jobs, jobs they were proud of who warmed their beds and ate the food they cooked and if they didn’t talk much still they knew each other was close by, and they loved their kids together. Yeah the women worked too because you wanted for your kids more than what you had. but look at the secretaries and court reporters in the sentence beginning the last paragraph. Where there used to be rooms full of woman typing reports, only a few are needed for the production of reports and the like, and more and more paper is unnecessary. Maybe you keep one for a record of a transaction, but business is conducted by between buyer and seller, between vendors and sales associates, between service companies and the companies they serve by lap top directly, in emails and chat spaces and face time and skype.
One of my daughters, a team director with a company that serves the pharmaceutical industry, sometimes sits in my home office (I write poems) and conducts meetings, her laptop in her lap( appropriately, her legs stretched out on the chaise. She manages world- wide surveys, analyzes them, communicates her results, holds the hands of her clients, and manages a team that works together, almost entirely on line. They have an office downtown, because they work better if they can see one another but almost all of the work is conducted on line. She graduated from college summa cum laude.
Which brings me to education. An anecdote. I was a grad student in English at Rutgers between 1964 and 1972 or thereabouts. I was friendly with the daughter of one of my professors who lived in a nearby town in middle Jersey. Her neighbors were union member, factory workers, and middle management, probably Polish-American, Italian American, what we called then, hyphenated Americans. They hadn’t been immigrants for generations.
Here is the story, my friend, let’s call her Amy, got into a dispute, fight, wiwth a neighbor’s kid across the street a bouy her own age, which was 16. It was probably about car. maybe there was a fender bender, not serious, occasioned by their both coming out of the their driveways without looking. They got into a pushing war about who would have to pay. They mother of the boy came out, Amy had been pushed onto the ground and was getting herself up when the mother came over to her. Shouting you leave my boy alone, you, you college material.
Two things about that: “college material” as a fighting word, tremendous feeling loaded into a bureaucratic term with no intrinsic linguistic power and you know that her son’s guidance counselor had admonished the mother that her son was not it. You can almost hear the class contempt in the voice of the person who said it to her, You can certainly hear that the guidance counselor had no sense of the way her words closed down the dreams of the family, no sense that they might be painful.
There was no sexual implication here. The violence wasn’t disturbing. The mom came out to stop the fight. Not to help Amy but to save her son from getting in trouble. but the words spoke volumes. Told a story the end of which we are hearing today. By end I mean the outcome.
College doesn’t save you anymore anyway. All those middle management jobs that got squeezed (remember lean and mean)out beginning in the eighties, those men and women had some college maybe a bachelor’s. What I am trying to say is we just haven’t been listening. And we haven’t been listening to what the by now clearly mainstream white population hears when they hear Donald Trump speak.
I was a civil rights attorney for twenty one years in the State of Louisiana. And I did good work, but it didn’t pay until late in the game so to support my family I was a part time public defender in juvenile court and handled cases in Jefferson Parish for the public defender there or people sent me cases that involved teenagers in trouble. I saw things. When families were in trouble and they were white the agencies established to deal with those problems, poverty, schools, clinics were unavailable to them. Partly because intake was geared to black people and blacks and white speak a different language, partly because racism (no, if you are a racist you don’t want to talk about your problems with a black intake worker no matter how well trained she is) and partly because the agencies just did not see themselves as serving both populations, poor white people were the most underserved populations in South East Louisiana.
I never knew what to do about it. I was serving the black population in so many ways. I saw so many intractable problems I could at least chip away at if not even sometimes conquer. But even the voting rights cases where we changed the districts so that there would be black representation on Boards of alderman and Parish councils, even though they solved ages old injustices, still created unresolved divisions and resentment.
When Bush was elected (so to speak) I was living on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the open meetings that followed, people trying to figure out what was going on, as citizens in Massachusetts do, I would try to explain that there was an underlying and massive reaction of to the civil rights movement that involved more than the simple word backlash, people thought I was blaming the civil rights movement. even that I was racist.
It’s hard to have social change. It’s hard to talk about it. It’s hard not to give moral priority to the cause of equality and diversity when you are fighting for it. there’s no question that in battle you tend to obliterate your consciousness of the needs of the people who stand in your way.
So, now we learn to make deals, I suppose. Because the truth is there aren’t going to be solutions to the economic and social pressures on Trump supporters. And I already see a path where the militarized police forces become a kind of private army for Trump, or SS. He doesn’t have to go to the militias. The organization is already there and it is armed. I started writing when I got up this morning and I don’t know whether Hillary managed to pull it out in the last minute or Trump is our president. I don’t know whether he will pull wiser heads around him, or proceed to arrest Clinton in some crazy imitation of the Hitler after the Anschluss in Austria. But I thought I would get this down for my friends at Dailykos who have floated me through this terrible election season with the knowledge that there are thinking people all over the country who will work to solve this stumble in democracy.
The mortality rate is dropping among all groups except for one. that one is non college educated white men. The high rate of suicide, drug addiction, and inadequate access to medical care. The public news servers and the governors talk with great concern about Oxycontin and heroine, but you can make your own meth and I don’t think it’s gone away.
Milton Friedman and the heartless market. Tariffs are gone. Bain industries and a thousand other heartless wall street and industrial giants buy up companies and “slim them down” so they are lean and mean. A thousand people are fired. then ten thousand, remember Michael Moore’s First movie, “Roger and me?” That was about the closing of plants in Michigan. White people lost their jobs. So did black people. Among them people were managers and inspectors and secretaries.
Secretaries. that brings me to technology. computers. No one needs a secretary or for that matter a court reporter. anymore because spell check, recorders, because videos. Assembly line workers replaces by big smart manufacturing machines. You can probably three D print a car and have it functioning in the time it takes to make a human in West World. You think I’m kidding, one of my daughters’ former boyfriends worked for a startup that manufactured testing equipment for one of the private space explorer companies. A three D printer made the testing equipment.
Which brings me to women. Here is what fills the lives of women: their families, their men, their husbands, their providers and mainstays losing their jobs, jobs they were proud of who warmed their beds and ate the food they cooked and if they didn’t talk much still they knew each other was close by, and they loved their kids together. Yeah the women worked too because you wanted for your kids more than what you had. but look at the secretaries and court reporters in the sentence beginning the last paragraph. Where there used to be rooms full of woman typing reports, only a few are needed for the production of reports and the like, and more and more paper is unnecessary. Maybe you keep one for a record of a transaction, but business is conducted by between buyer and seller, between vendors and sales associates, between service companies and the companies they serve by lap top directly, in emails and chat spaces and face time and skype.
One of my daughters, a team director with a company that serves the pharmaceutical industry, sometimes sits in my home office (I write poems) and conducts meetings, her laptop in her lap( appropriately, her legs stretched out on the chaise. She manages world- wide surveys, analyzes them, communicates her results, holds the hands of her clients, and manages a team that works together, almost entirely on line. They have an office downtown, because they work better if they can see one another but almost all of the work is conducted on line. She graduated from college summa cum laude.
Which brings me to education. An anecdote. I was a grad student in English at Rutgers between 1964 and 1972 or thereabouts. I was friendly with the daughter of one of my professors who lived in a nearby town in middle Jersey. Her neighbors were union member, factory workers, and middle management, probably Polish-American, Italian American, what we called then, hyphenated Americans. They hadn’t been immigrants for generations.
Here is the story, my friend, let’s call her Amy, got into a dispute, fight, wiwth a neighbor’s kid across the street a bouy her own age, which was 16. It was probably about car. maybe there was a fender bender, not serious, occasioned by their both coming out of the their driveways without looking. They got into a pushing war about who would have to pay. They mother of the boy came out, Amy had been pushed onto the ground and was getting herself up when the mother came over to her. Shouting you leave my boy alone, you, you college material.
Two things about that: “college material” as a fighting word, tremendous feeling loaded into a bureaucratic term with no intrinsic linguistic power and you know that her son’s guidance counselor had admonished the mother that her son was not it. You can almost hear the class contempt in the voice of the person who said it to her, You can certainly hear that the guidance counselor had no sense of the way her words closed down the dreams of the family, no sense that they might be painful.
There was no sexual implication here. The violence wasn’t disturbing. The mom came out to stop the fight. Not to help Amy but to save her son from getting in trouble. but the words spoke volumes. Told a story the end of which we are hearing today. By end I mean the outcome.
College doesn’t save you anymore anyway. All those middle management jobs that got squeezed (remember lean and mean)out beginning in the eighties, those men and women had some college maybe a bachelor’s. What I am trying to say is we just haven’t been listening. And we haven’t been listening to what the by now clearly mainstream white population hears when they hear Donald Trump speak.
I was a civil rights attorney for twenty one years in the State of Louisiana. And I did good work, but it didn’t pay until late in the game so to support my family I was a part time public defender in juvenile court and handled cases in Jefferson Parish for the public defender there or people sent me cases that involved teenagers in trouble. I saw things. When families were in trouble and they were white the agencies established to deal with those problems, poverty, schools, clinics were unavailable to them. Partly because intake was geared to black people and blacks and white speak a different language, partly because racism (no, if you are a racist you don’t want to talk about your problems with a black intake worker no matter how well trained she is) and partly because the agencies just did not see themselves as serving both populations, poor white people were the most underserved populations in South East Louisiana.
I never knew what to do about it. I was serving the black population in so many ways. I saw so many intractable problems I could at least chip away at if not even sometimes conquer. But even the voting rights cases where we changed the districts so that there would be black representation on Boards of alderman and Parish councils, even though they solved ages old injustices, still created unresolved divisions and resentment.
When Bush was elected (so to speak) I was living on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the open meetings that followed, people trying to figure out what was going on, as citizens in Massachusetts do, I would try to explain that there was an underlying and massive reaction of to the civil rights movement that involved more than the simple word backlash, people thought I was blaming the civil rights movement. even that I was racist.
It’s hard to have social change. It’s hard to talk about it. It’s hard not to give moral priority to the cause of equality and diversity when you are fighting for it. there’s no question that in battle you tend to obliterate your consciousness of the needs of the people who stand in your way.
So, now we learn to make deals, I suppose. Because the truth is there aren’t going to be solutions to the economic and social pressures on Trump supporters. And I already see a path where the militarized police forces become a kind of private army for Trump, or SS. He doesn’t have to go to the militias. The organization is already there and it is armed. I started writing when I got up this morning and I don’t know whether Hillary managed to pull it out in the last minute or Trump is our president. I don’t know whether he will pull wiser heads around him, or proceed to arrest Clinton in some crazy imitation of the Hitler after the Anschluss in Austria. But I thought I would get this down for my friends at Dailykos who have floated me through this terrible election season with the knowledge that there are thinking people all over the country who will work to solve this stumble in democracy.
