'cuz there's no minorities in the west, right? Certainly no Native Americans or Hispanics. There's the difference- nobody has ever bothered to value the West. It's apparently too far for the overwrought narrators of the Eastern Seaboard to travel.Moving is also far easier said than done. For some, it means having to give up on a place and family that is all you know and all that values you. In Gary, the conflict between wanting and needing to stay, and understanding you might have to leave, is especially strong.
First and foremost, while I wouldn’t necessarily accuse NPR of making clickbaity articles (though I’ll totally admit that the Guardian really seems to enjoy skating along that line sometimes), this seems to being an ongoing conversation for a lot of news sources because they get page views and page views drive revenue of course. A lot of these conversations, from opioids to declining manufacturing to decaying cities seems to involve the midwest because I guess that’s where everyone assumes things are happening. Right now it really could be the social trend of “if it bleeds, it leads.” You, and snoodog and anyone else that wants to chime in about how dying towns aren’t anything new are totally right. Hell, I come across them all the time when I’m out for my country drives or out antiquing. Some are etched in my memory as no stoplight towns with one gas station, a Subway, and a laundromat as the only businesses in sight. Some are etched in my memory as total speedtraps or that place with that really awesome pizza that if it was near a college campus they’d be raking in dough every damn day of the week. Some? Some aren’t even in my GPS or Google Maps and I wonder if they still qualify as a town or something else entirely. That said, those places all stick out in my mind because they all have this atmosphere to them that says “dying town.” The majority of places I come across? They’re kicking and doing awesome with all sorts of advertisements for summer festivals and nice looking downtowns and what have you. So, I dunno. They’ve existed for a while and I’ve never stopped to consider them, not even when I’m reading this article. Which is weird. Because while I haven’t lived in any dying towns, there’s always been some right near by and everyone seems to know it even if no one wants to openly talk about it. I wonder though, if this focus NPR has on the Midwest, might have a lot to do with the decline of manufacturing. The two seem to go hand in hand for obvious reasons and I think the distinction between dying towns the in the west and dying towns now in the midwest is that for the west, the ephemeralness of towns was kind of expected from the get go, where in the midwest people assumed that this kind of stuff wouldn’t happen. Which is weird, cause manufacturing has been on the decline ever since I was old enough to understand the meaning of the word “economy.” It’s like everyone thinks that factory closings were something that happens to other people and while everyone totally saw it coming, everyone acts like they totally didn’t see it coming. Which is dumb. Economy 101 is don’t put all your eggs in one basket. On a slight tangent, but related in ways that I probably don’t understand because the thought crept into my head when I was thinking about all of this, there seems to be an every growing distrust of authority, and not just “Watch out for the IRS” levels of distrust. There’s distrust that the jobs that are here this year will be here next year. There’s distrust that retirement funds will still be around, even for people who retirement is just around the corner. There’s distrust in the stock market, in housing prices, in the governments’ (local, state, and national) abilities to really do anything. Everyone I seem to talk to, there’s this growing fear of frailty and risk and temporariness and that the next change, while unknown, is expected to be bad. Maybe for NPR and The Guardian and whoever else, they want to tap into that fear, and for them, The Midwest is their boogyman.
It's the entire goddamn media landscape, the fundamental makeup of the country, the basic elitism of everywhere that was a state prior to 1872. It's the fact that oh holy shit the coal miners are starving now as if it didn't happen to the peat miners in Scotland before them. I grew up surrounded by Anasazi ruins. Careful where you hike, there's a pitfall dug a thousand years ago over there. What happened to the Anasazi? Drought, cannibalism, internecine warfare and collapse. What rose up? The Pueblo indians (farmers) and the Apache and Navajo (reavers). And the farmers fortified against the reavers and then the Spanish came and wiped out the farmers and the reavers got guns and it wasn't until the US Army bribed them with cattle that they stopped harassing farms because fuckin'A that had been their way of life since 1100AD or so. I also grew up with gas stations that no longer exist, farmsteads that vanished when the water rights were traded away, barbed wire fence that haven't been tended in 60 years because nobody's running cattle on this land anymore and guys who would shoot at you if you decided to hike across their bazillion-acre ranch (now one of the principle filming locations of Longmire, I might add). And whenever somebody left their land, they were ruined, pure and simple. It's not like they got a realtor to sell it to some other bastard. Nope. That shit's gone. Wanna see the kleinbl00 family homestead? Google up Claunch, NM and have yourself a street view. Perhaps you'd prefer Hope, AZ? Pick just about any place you've never heard of. You wanna know what global warming looks like, have yourself some virtual tourism in AZ. But OH FUCK any of that shit starts happening east of the MIssissippi it's a goddamn cataclysm. And I can tell you why. Gary, Indiana, mutherfucker. A '60s interpretation of a '50s vision of a '20s America in which Norman Rockwell painted the beautiful white truth of wholesome families and the permanent, perpetual safety net of Midwest American manufacturing and agriculture, a glorious post-war retconning of America Fuck Yeah for the 'boomers to hold close to their heart and understand that the USA was the greatest nation on earth and always would be and change would never come for them no matter how much Ike started ranting about a military-industrial complex, so long as we keep the Commies from corrupting our kids it's all gonna come up Rogers and Hammerstein. Because that's America, you see. Tom Joad? he's a fictional character. Dust Bowl? That happens to other people. Change? Well, the West is dynamic. Chicago is now and shall always be the 2nd largest city in the world, second only to the New York (and without all those pesky immigrants). And now they're addicted to heroin and their life expectancy is dropping and their kids scooted as soon as they were able to those Sodoms and Gomorrahs full of gay marriage and needle exchanges and abortion and if we just vote angry enough the Music Man will come back.