HEARTLAND
I happened on an online interview with a young woman, Sarah Smarsh, who grew up in Kansas where she lived a hard childhood near the poverty line. She had enough to eat and a roof over her head but was a very perceptive child who gradually realized that her life was made much harder by the fact that she was born into a lower class poor white culture that was almost impossible for most poor Kansan rural whites to escape.
So I bought the book of her story, Heartland, of how she discovered her lower class status and how through determination and making the most of educational opportunities she was able both to see what was good in the culture she was brought up in and what blocked most people in that culture from having a middle class standard of living and quality of life.
And I think this story, which touched me deeply, was a guide to understanding my barber, whom I have written about, and the life of many people whose families have lived in the Swannanoa valley for generations who are furious with the white educated middle class that I live within which they see as corrupting the cultural values that they feel so strongly about, their traditional American values. Liberal northern outsiders threaten their traditional way of life through tourism, gentrification which pushes up the cost of living, openness to immigrants and blacks and gays, and a snobbish disdain for uneducated Swannanoa hillbillies. In addition liberals are somehow responsible for globalization, moving the good factory jobs overseas. The city of Asheville, which is thriving on gentrification and tourism and is extremely liberal is the enemy.
The circumstances in Kansas where corporate agriculture destroyed small farms and Western North Carolina where it was corporations who closed their factories and moved manufacturing to Mexico or China are different, but the result, leaving people poor and without a way to earn a good living are similar.
But what Sarah Smarsh insisted on was the strong culture of hard work, supporting your neighbor, the belief in freedom and individualism which is what supports people in either place. She loves her family and community. She particularly honors the strong women in her family who got pregnant early, dealt with abusive husbands, raised their children as single mothers and finally found a way to a decent job and a tolerable life. They were hard workers, Sarah was a hard worker and my barber is a hard worker who have found that in spite of being a hard worker the middle class life has eluded them.
Sarah Smarsh doesn’t see Trump as a savior, but she is as angry as any MAGA person at the way the American capitalist system has let her poor white social class down and kept them down.
She feels that in a country this rich everyone should be able to live decently including everyone in rural Kansas and everyone in the Swannanoa Valley. And it is this anger that at least partly fuels the MAGA movement.
I don’t know the solution, but I am slowly gaining empathy for the social class of people who feel this way, often people who can’t afford education or simply can’t stomach education and the educated middle class. They are not nuts, even if Donald Trump is. They see that they are being unfairly treated and unfairly perceived and labeled and they don’t like it at all.
Again I am only an 87 year old man trying to sort out the anger that is so much in the air these days. And writing here is my way of doing this, for myself if no one else.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 