Let's call my cousin Jake. He's a few years older than me, in the transition cohort between Baby Boomer and GenX. He's the youngest of several; two brothers went to Vietnam and used their GI Bill; one brother didn't return. His two sisters were pretty much denied factory work on gender lines; one went to nursing school and moved to the closest big city; the other worked her way through a teaching degree and also moved. Jake was born into a factory and farm community in the Rust Belt, one that was very Democratic until Reagan. Jake was too young for Vietnam, and hit 18 when post Vietnam recruitment was really tight, so he did some trade school after high school but college was never in the cards because he was also the last one left at home, and by then, his father needed his help. His father passed him some of the farmland when his Dad started to slow down, but Jake always knew that he'd be working at the local auto factory between times. Jake's high school class was smaller than the classes of his siblings -- he was one of the early cohort of the post-Pill era.
What Jake grew up seeing on the farm was a community that had a lot of interaction; it wasn't very solitary. Same with the factory world of the 70s. Break times and lunch times were social times; farmers were in and out of the supply barn, the elevator and each other's workshops and land all the time. It was more labor intensive, too; it wasn't uncommon for three or four people to then be doing the work that one person does today. There was one radio station, locally owned, and one newspaper, and the area got four television signals. But that changed over the course of the 70s and 80s, in part because there were fewer people to do the labor. In the first decade after the Pill was introduced, the birth rate fell. The changes in farm policy under the Nixon administration also forced a lot of labor changes, because it became impossible to support a family *and* pay farm hands with the end of soil banking and the ever-full granary system and crop supports.
The intransigence of the Big 3 during the oil crisis, and the refusal of the UAW to adapt to quality oriented production (the NUMMI model), resulting in strikes and layoffs, in the early 80s didn't help, either. Any one of those would have been survivable, but for the Rusty Farm Belt to have dealt with all three within a few years put them into a semi-permanent state of recession. And those were all well before NAFTA.
So... Jake came of age in a work environment where he's alone most of the time. He doesn't have the social interaction with his peers that his father had. His town has gotten smaller, and Jake was pretty typical -- he was never encouraged to expand his horizons and all of the expectations for him were to stay home and follow the rural agricultural model. He's profoundly lonely, in part because he's part of a smaller cohort and a lot of his cohort was encouraged to leave. Humans need interaction, and what fills that void is radio. Hate radio, because that's what's available when running a community radio station got too expensive and syndicated shows took over. Hate radio thrives because it's much cheaper for a community station to subscribe to a feed than to pay three people. Same with the local newspaper.
Jake lives in a contracted bubble. When he has factory shifts, he takes his breaks alone, because that's the most productive model. When he's working the land, he's doing it alone. The Masons and the Rotary and church and community activities that filled his father's social hours have contracted or failed; the church and the high school have consolidated because the contracted tithe/tax bases can't support the local model.
Then there are people like me, a few years younger, and one of the children of one of the ones who got out. My parents got the college educations, moved to an urban growth area, and I could afford college (scholarships in my case, but scholarships were available for me and college was an expectation). We want to help Jake, and we come armed with education, skills, data and methods that we know will work to make his life better if he can just change some methodology, but what Jake needs are people and community, and we don't stay. He doesn't need the tools we can offer. That breeds resentment. He's not interested, and he doesn't have the emotional skills to admit that he's lonely, because he's never known anything different and was never taught to connect with his emotional space.
He's watched his friends' kids get chewed up by the war machine and spat out, with nothing but pain and PTSD. He's watched that despair turn into drug abuse, because pain clinics are everywhere, and they're one of the last businesses making money.
It's jealousy, and resentment, and exasperation, born from profound isolation and depression. He sees his community falling into despair -- meth and opiates are self-medication for existential despair. Jake knows he can't leave for greener pastures -- maybe his farmland is worth millions, but even if he sells it and moves to a condo in a city, what's he going to do all day? All of his life he's been told to work, and his skills won't translate. He's scared to admit he can't make a transition, he doesn't have the experience with learning to retrain for something else, and who would hire a deeply-middle aged former farmer with a brand new degree, anyway? And he's in the best shape. He knows people for whom that's not even remotely possible. And so the resentment builds, while hate is pouring into his ears every day. And now add in satellite TV, so he sees what he is missing every day. His kids aren't going to stay because they know there's a bigger world. So his loneliness is only going to get worse.
His outrage and resentment have become the fuel that gets him through the day-to-day despair. He has someone to blame, even if it's misplaced. His community was a sundown town, so the biggest cultural divide he's ever seen is between the Baptists and the Methodists. The most foreign food he's ever eaten is a Taco Bell taco or a midwestern pizza.
And I have no idea how we, as Democrats, talk across that resentment and isolation. Because Jake doesn't want us there.
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