Forums

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I'd level with them. I think they suspect there's an honesty that's being kept from them and they don't like being messaged.

Geoghehan's point is that there's a serious honesty to the current message ("Go to college like us") that is being heard loud and clear, and that's the problem. But anyway...

I'd say what Obama, Bush II, and McCain all said: "The jobs of the past aren't coming back."

I'd add:

"That's reality. Full stop. No carve outs. Coal mining is a dead end. Forever.

But you can still have vibrant communities. You can build something here the same way the people with nothing built lives for themselves here long ago. You can set up farming cooperatives, you can rebuild the town center, and you can have a life not terribly unlike the one you forebears had. But you have to rely on each other. You have to band together a bit. Don't be greedy. Value community and maybe you'll wind up a lot luckier than a lot of us on the coasts will be. We have what look like fabulous existences, but humans are wired for community... and it is not coming back for us. But it could be coming back for you. You could be the small hamlets. Maybe being distanced from us is the greatest gift you could be given?

But you have to do it. We won't do it for you. You have to rebuild. You have to cooperate. Democrats will help you do that because we actually care. Republicans will only work on behalf of the local land baron who'd make you serfs... They don't care about you, and they never did. They care about those with capital. And these 'populist' Republicans under Trump are just liars."

- OR -

"Move. If your town is awful, and you want to go somewhere with a future, we'll help you do it. We'll support laws that allow you to clear your debts more quickly, get rid of that home that's losing value and holding you back. We'll try to give you a second chance to make it somewhere with a better future."

In conjunction with the second message, we'd have to offer some form of mortgage/debt relief or tax credits to allow those trapped in these bad areas to escape. And it can't just be for Trumpkins in flyover land. It has to also be offered to all the people who for generations have been imprisoned in poverty in inner cities.

I don't know if it'd work, but I really can't think of anything to say other than, "Rebuild your shit or move." That's the bargain the immigrants who came here a century plus ago were offered. I say restate it, with some sweeteners.

But at a minimum, there has to be honesty. These angry Trump voters who have a burn-it-all-down mindset know they're fucked. Trump told them they were right, which gifted him their votes. Tell them again, but with an even more honest, and less divisive, more inclusive invitation.

It can't hurt. Honesty never hurts. And most of what's fucking up this country right now is myths, narratives, and dishonesty.

There are places that had better prospects than they ever will again, and neither the government nor cooperation can change that. Detroit is never going to make cars for the world like it once did. Rural Iowa is losing farm jobs, because rural communities all over the industrialized world have been losing farm jobs for decades and it's not changing. My grandfather grew up in a town in Wyoming that doesn't exist anymore. It's not coming back.