Stankorb on the little, lost forlorn places: sacrifice zones of late stage capitalism.
"My hometown no longer feels like home."
"They and their few remaining neighbors were cushioned by the happenstance of settling down when times were bad but not busted, a decade or two before bankers perfected the exploitation of the American dream."
"There have been rounds of drug busts. My mom emailed me when a previous neighbor was arrested for trafficking heroin. "
"they’ve finally knocked old Trumpie’s house"
"in 2016, for the first time in my life, the majority of people in my home county voted for a Republican candidate."
“Bob’s house might be next,”
" “The house next door didn’t sell,” ... Their former next-door neighbor, a man in his sixties who couldn’t earn enough as a Walmart greeter, has moved out. After the foreclosure, he squatted in the house for close to a year with the curtains drawn. "
"this one too might be demolished."
"Even if they can sell their house, it wouldn’t be enough for a down payment elsewhere. But they can’t stay in this big, aging house, full of stairs, my mom on a walker and my dad with his breathing. They manage, through the sheer force of my father’s will, his insistence on taking care of them both. But I see no other way to get them out. I’ve asked. They refuse."
"my people were Rust Belt people, I was told. Those words were supposed to encapsulate the decay, the abandoned workplaces, the rampant unemployment. We were seen by outsiders as wasted people, rotting with disuse."
"there was often nowhere else for them to go."
"my mother described the death of a neighbor, the mother of friends, who had stopped breathing. City revenue had fallen so much that the ambulances were outsourced from a nearby town, and the driver couldn’t find our street. She hadn’t been breathing for some time when they finally arrived.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to lose my mother to poverty—because that’s really what killed our neighbor—then realized the same thing could happen to my mother easily. I tried not to think about it.
When friends’ parents succumbed to preventable diseases, I never thought to blame poverty for the check-ups and scans they never had."
"A local injection well was dug incorrectly—that is, directly into a fault line—and over a year, in quiet northeast Ohio, there were a dozen earthquakes. Plaster in my parents’ walls buckled. Fissures tricked up the walls and became cracks. "
"I used to think the decline in my hometown was Rust Belt-specific, but now wonder how many neighborhoods in collapse it takes for a country to lose its sense of self. "
"I think of all the commentary on these poor, white neighborhoods ... become another caste we hypothesize about in generalizations, and my parents are trapped here."
" the Democrats have not learned what they should from those elusive, poor, white Trump voters"
"But tangled in with the overtly racist, anti-Muslim, anti-woman Trump supporters are the why should I still vote Democrat, nothing ever changes people whose poverty left them alienated enough they felt justified looking the other way about the rest. It was a vote, not full-fledged support. It wasn’t right. But sequestering them isn’t either—especially not for people like my parents who don’t agree with any of it but are just stuck. (Financial freedom gives people the power to choose their neighbors. Poverty does not.)
Much as we’ve spent generations trying to deny America’s inherent racism, we’ve also always been eager to forget the poor. Our classism is yet another original sin."
https://catapult.co/stories/fabric-of-community-gone-threadbaresidd