alt Hacker NewsI'm from a very poor Appalachian town. My only option to better my life was to get up and leave.
People from my hometown do talk about the good old days. People worked at union factories and my grandfather worked a well paying railroad job. My no-name town of 1000 people had a train station that made it possible to go to NYC. My grandpa got paid a handsome retirement from the railroad company. When he died, my grandmother was able to receive his benefits.
My hometown votes against building railways. The station has long crumbled. They vote against unions. The factories are long gone. They've voted against any sort of retirement benefits. The elderly are struggling and depending on churches handing out food.
Even if those factories come back, they'll be paid less than my ancestors did. They'll never have an affordable link to cities hours away. They'll never get the retirement benefits my ancestors had. And if you mention giving them these benefits, they yell and say they don't want them. The youth in my hometown who worked hard in school (we somehow had a decent school, all things considered) used their education as a ticket out. Now the people there are pissed and they're coming for education next.
These people don't want "the plant." They want to be young again, without understanding that their youth was great because my ancestors busted their asses to give us great opportunities. They squandered everything that was given to us.
Replies
32 years after my father died, I still only get 1.9x the pay he used to get for manual labour. Given that inflation goes roughly double every 20 years, its clear I am getting less pay then he did. I also had to leave my village, because there were simply zero good opportunities to work in IT. The young leaving rural villages are pretty much common, and has almost nothing to do with how people vote. Neither in which country they actually reside. Its a downward trend, everywhere.
My background is very similar. Grew up in a small, poor mountain town that once boomed with industry but today is crumbling to dust as the population becomes increasingly elderly and young people either leave for greener pastures or abuse substances in order to escape their reality and succumb to addiction.
The industry that once fueled the town is long gone and isn’t ever coming back, and as you say even if a new industry moved in the jobs it’d open up would be so grueling and abusive that it wouldn’t be a net improvement to anybody’s lives, thanks to all the worker protections stripped away over the years.
It’s not enough to “just” make jobs available. They need to be good jobs with proper protections and support that allow people to thrive.
This is very telling. The American Empire didn't even work for Americans. Who really benefitted? Just the Elites? Why should common people care about propping up an empire if the people in power don't bother about them. For context, read this thread.
Since you grew up there, what was their rationale for repudiating pro-labor policies at the ballot box?
They squandered the sacrifice of their parents, and now they're asking their children to sacrifice for their benefit.
Reminds me on 'the town' in the book Damon Copperhead.
I'm sorry to hear that. That's genuinely painful to read, but it's a reality that I've seen reflected elsewhere.
I tend to think about Feynman's Challenger commission report whenever I come across stories like yours, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
For a successful society, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. And yes, nature will come for us all be it pestilence or disease, or a storm that washes it all away. Nature never stops.
We created civilization and society as a way to escape nature's wrath. To become something more, to rise above the muck, and when we degrade that we will inevitably go back to the muck.