In a Frontpage round-up, today, there was a link to an article on Cracked (wait. Please, stay with me.) entitled How Half of America Lost Its Fucking Mind.
It was written by David Wong, the Executive Editor of Cracked, and the article made me think about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. It also has me trying to think about a portion of the Trump base in a more empathetic manner — well, at least I’m trying to. Because, I think we not only have an opportunity, but also we may have a mission, as Progressives, to do something big, much like Franklin and Eleanor did when they reached out to help rural America.
I live in Kentucky, Northern KY, which if you knew KY means that we’re actually the suburbs of Cincinnati. This normally makes the neighborhood I live in very, very Republican and deeply red. However, things are different this time around. Usually, lawns and every major road are covered with the Republican nominee’s signs. I’ve seen exactly 2 in all my travels around our area, and the homes they were in front of were small farm houses. Now, going out of the suburbs into the outlying, more rural areas? Yard after yard has a bright, shiny Trump sign … and one more thing: signs of trouble.
They’re small signs, but we’ve been starting to notice that outside our suburban areas around our packed strip malls, crowded restaurants, and new car lots, there are areas that are looking somehow shabbier, less cared for, and there’s more rusted cars running on their donut tires on the 2 lane roads. The small rural homes on the 20-30 acre farms need paint jobs, and more of them than ever have unmanned veggie stands out front offering tomatoes and zucchini for ridiculously low prices.
“Leave your money in the [nailed down] Honor Box, and God Bless You. “
There are even broken fences! They are actually what started getting my attention first. Broken fences around pasture land. Having grown up with horses, my heart skips a beat seeing a broken fence as I begin scanning for the runaway horse that broke through and if there’s a herd of them about to follow suit. But, the height and top of vegetation in the pastures makes it immediately clear that no livestock have been in them for a year or so. Where did the farmer’s livestock go, and why aren’t they repairing those fences!?!
As a teacher, our schools’ Service Club dressed more students for the beginning of the year than we ever had during our Back-to-School Clothing Drive. I’ve already bought glasses for 3 of my students, this year. In past years, I’ve managed to get the kids into the Lion’s Club program for their glasses before the ones they were wearing fell completely apart, but the needs were too immediate to be able to wait, this year. My students had no glasses to even patch together. Same situation with school supplies — my first 2 weeks of pay went to Target to desperately get backpacks with supplies into too many of my students’ lockers before their classmates noticed that they’d shown up for the first week of school with only a pencil and slim, spiral notebook. And, shoes, jackets and hats! Our Service Club is doing a new gym shoe and outer wear drive, now, so we can get decent shoes on too many feet before the cold weather sets in.
I think David Wong’s article provides a very authentic picture of what is going on, with the other half of Trump’s base, that Hillary was not calling the Deplorables. The narrative is not Red verses Blue; it is rural verses urban.
And, they aren’t deplorable — they’re miserable. From Wong’s article:
Blue islands in an ocean of red. The cities are less than 4 percent of the land mass, but 62 percent of the population and easily 99 percent of the popular culture. Our movies, shows, songs, and news all radiate out from those blue islands.
And if you live in the red, that fucking sucks.
Our rural areas were hit hard by the Recession and the transfer of industries overseas. However, unlike urban areas where at least some companies remained, the rural towns were made up of small family farms that augmented their incomes by one or more family members working in the single, big company in town.
When, Walmart moved in, the Mom and Pop small businesses died, and when the single, big company left, the towns themselves died. Farmland that had been in families for generations got sold off to predatory big Ag, and livestock went to auction one head at a time as the inevitable drip, drip, drip of life’s emergencies happened in one family after another. Hence, the broken and untended fences dotting the region beyond my suburban surrounds.
David Wong shares:
Where I grew up, it was an oil refinery closing that did us in. I was raised in the hollowed-out shell of what the town had once been. The roof of our high school leaked when it rained. Cities can make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs with service jobs -- small towns cannot. That model doesn't work below a certain population density.
If you don't live in one of these small towns, you can't understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called "Cost of Living." Let's say you're a smart kid making $8 an hour at Walgreen's and aspire to greater things. Fine, get ready to move yourself and your new baby into a 700-square-foot apartment for $1,200 a month, and to then pay double what you're paying now for utilities, groceries, and babysitters.
When the misery turns inward it becomes hopelessness with skyrocketing suicide and addition rates, and when it goes outward? It becomes bitter anger. A once proud, productive part of America frankly doesn’t know and doesn’t understand what happened to their way of life, and they’ve actually done a damn poor job of rightly diagnosing the cause of their pain IMO. Around the Dkos community, we’ve been scratching our heads in wonder and disbelief about how they’ve been voting against their self interest for years. Wong discusses the interplay of local churches, racism borne of lack of exposure to “others,” and very real competition with Hispanic workers for the high paying, dangerous agricultural work left in rural areas on big Ag spreads.
And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone has replied to this with a comment saying, "You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!" Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit, at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities.
Plus, it IS a complex economic and political picture of cause and effect that requires the ability to understand a multiple causal factor scenario. Reading Wong’s article, I fantasized what the reaction might have been had Occupy sent armies to pitch tents on the sites of the boarded up factories in small towns across America — in solidarity with rural American workers. I wonder if the 1%er message would have gotten through? What if our increasingly elitist Democrats in power had been instead like Bernie? Or Eleanor Roosevelt as she visited town after town through Appalachia?
So, the bitterly angry have turned to Trump who at least seems to be getting some attention focused on them.
Is their racism, misogyny, homophobia okay? Of course, it isn’t! But, I don’t think it’s as hardened as some may think it is. I think it’s mainly insular tribalism that would dissolve pretty quickly with greater opportunities for associations with folks from elsewhere. I think they just want help to get back on their feet, and they don’t want it in the form of government handouts. The number of people they’ve seen devolve into a state of hopeless, trailer-park, disability check dependency is scary to a once proud and productive part of America. Is that the only realistic fate open to them?
Anyway, David Wong’s article really struck me, because Trump’s base numbers in the millions of our fellow Americans and not all of them are of the alt-right Deplorables Hillary named. I think they are people that we Progressives have traditionally championed in the past, and I think we could and should be seriously thinking about doing so during Hillary’s first term. (And, especially so if we want her to have a 2nd term.)
I don’t know what the answers are for rural America that can’t just turn to a service solution (too small a population for that), and education is a long term solution. But, it isn’t an impossible, implacable problem. FDR brought electricity to rural America. Maybe we should be championing free high speed internet access and free on-line college tuition for everyone in economically strapped rural areas. I don’t know, but I do know we could be doing better than pointing and laughing at all of them. I’m convinced that we could and should embrace and authentically, respectfully the cause of workers verses the 1% and the income/ wealth gap that has caused so much suffering in not only our cities, but also across our country sides.
I also understand that some of the pols on our team HAVE tried to help with legislation, but Republicans have blocked those efforts. So, maybe we need to set up community centers in towns and send more Americorp workers out there to do the kinds of things we teachers have become the default first responders for in this country. Speaking of which, I have to run. I’m meeting one of my former students for dinner at the local McDonalds for a GED tutoring session. McD’s has a playground there, so it’s free childcare for her 4 yo while she and I meet for our weekly study session. She dropped out of high school when she got pregnant in her Junior year, and she’s barely surviving on her local grocery job. She wants to to go to the local community college for her LPN degree. We meet up each week, so I can get them both a meal and get her ready for her exams. I don’t want her looking like the woman in the photo above in another decade.
I encourage everyone to read Wong’s article. I’d like to hear others’ opinions about it, and I’ll check back later to see if anyone else was interested when I get back home.