Flyover Country

Once again, I have not been blogging for a while.

I have the best reason in the world. I have been on vacation.

Now, some people who follow me might find it strange, but I spent my vacation in central Pennsylvania - the very heart of flyover country. I was not taking the political pulse of the people who live there, or doing some sort of sociological research into what makes up America’s heartland, or even seeing if I could start a newspaper.

No, I was playing games. Games that are played on tabletops, with cards and dice and little metal figures, or board games that let you fly a B-17 on a bombing mission over Germany, or to protect a future America from invasion by the forces of Communist Europe, expansion-driven South Americans and the Asian combine.

If you are interested, I defended the United States better than almost any other player I have ever seen, probably thanks to lucky reinforcement cards. I had to turn back from my bombing mission when my navigator was killed and the pilot lost his oxygen supply. In my spare time I was a victorious Carthaginian Admiral in a massive naval battle against the Greeks, and I put on a game with a friend to see whether merchants or pirates would be more successful sailing around the 16th Century Spanish Main, roughly from Cuba to South America.

A lot of gaming with a lot of interesting people, all of them sharing an interest in history, military history and in trying to find a good place to have lunch. More about that later.

None of my time was involved in interviewing people, or looking up facts about where we were staying. But, things ooze out. It gave me a whole new view of what a lot of people might have been thinking when they voted for Donald Trump.

It’s easy to get polarized if you live in a big city or are part of an East Coast or West Coast megapolis. It’s also easy to get polarized if you live in flyover country, where the roads need repair, where there are no available jobs - don’t count the summer demand for workers at amusement parks and other places that draw tourists - and where opportunities for a decent future just don’t come around very often.

We played our games in a modest motel in Myerstown, and you could count the nearby places to eat  on one hand. And two of the fingers were a McDonalds and a Hardee’s.

There was a passable Italian restaurant and a Chinese restaurant, and one or two bars. There were a lot more churches than bars. You couldn’t tell unless you looked it up, but the population of Meyerstown has hovered around 3,100 people for that past three decades, down from the boom days of 1970 when it was more than 3,600.

That’s when there were real jobs. Bringing those jobs back is what “Make America Great” means to the people in central Pennsylvania and much of flyover country, just as it does to people living in the heart of our big cities with just as few prospects of having a really good life. 

No one said it to me that plainly, and some people just hinted at it. The big road improvement projects in Pennsylvania don’t come to Meyerstown. There are a lot of banks there, but not much local lending.

There are not a lot of Hispanic immigrants sneaking across the border to work the local farms, which is reflected in census data that shows the population is more than 97 per-cent white. I didn’t see many “help wanted” signs as I drove around either. And, from the people I spoke to briefly - the people cleaning the halls and doing other work around the motel - there weren’t too many jobs to be found.

You couldn’t go to the local paper to find a job, because there is no local paper. A lot of them died off, starting in the 1970’s when the population started shrinking. But that was a half century ago, and no one really cares why it happened any more. It happened in a lot of places, and building billion dollar rail tunnels between New Jersey and New York doesn’t seem quite as important from the Meyerstown perspective.

Other things, too, don’t seem as important in rural Pennsylvania. A lot of the political debate you see on the cable channels is just noise, just people saying bad things about other people. The federal deficit isn’t too real either. I spoke to one man - yes, he was a Trump supporter - who didn’t believe me when I said the trillion dollar deficit this year was costing him more than a thousand dollars.

(Here’s the math. 300 million people in the U.S means that $3 from each of them is nearly a billion dollars. And a trillion is a thousand billion. Now, assuming the people living on social security and the people who are still in third grade are not making enough to pay taxes, the cost per head goes up for the rest of us. But, not for the really wealthy or the corporations which got 90 per-cent of our massive Republican tax cut.)

What is the most important lesson here? The people who live there really don’t like being called a basket of deplorables, a Hillary clip which I am sure was repeated endlessly before the election on the local Sinclair cable station. You really can’t ignore people, which is a lesson that has - I hope - been learned by the Democratic party, and a lesson which - I suspect - is now being forgotten by the red-hatted Trump supporters who are imposing a purity test on all their 2018 Congressional candidates.

So, what did I learn from my vacation in flyover country, other than the irony of not being able to get a really good salad in farm country?

One big lesson was that the people who live there want things to get better. More opportunities, more  jobs, more people coming back so that they can open a multiplex or maybe a nearby downtown worth going to on Saturdays. Talk about a billion dollars for a new bridge in Cleveland or California and it just doesn’t mean much to them. They pay taxes too.

So, the next candidates for president - 2020 is only two years away - had better have some good answers for them. Maybe more money for a community college or subsidies for a wind turbine manufacturer. Maybe a little more respect for the hard work they do, and some way to get out and find work elsewhere, at least until our nation can start chipping away at a half century of neglect. The same way we have to start chipping away at urban neglect.

Heck, there really isn’t that much difference between Meyerstown and Flint, even though no one living in either place would believe it.

Send In The Troops (To The Border)

So, we are sending our soldiers and airmen to protect the border from illegal immigrants who are trying to get into the United States. It seems like overkill to me, but that is just my opinion.

President Trump’s supporters see it as a strong and positive action, showing he has the guts and good sense to use his power to make us safe - exactly why they voted for him more than a year ago.

That being the case, let me address this blog to them. My other readers, who already agree with me, can focus on the legality of using our troops, or the cost of using our troops, or  the abuse of power this move represents.

Let me share a personal experience. Yes, something that actually happened to me nearly 50 years ago. When I was a bit player in another military mission to protect our nation, one authorized by President Richard Nixon.

I was a warrior in the great battle against about 200,000 Post Office workers, who had gone out for what would become an eight day strike. Nixon’s response was to call out about 24,000 troops to replace them and get the mail moving. And I was called up.

Now, no one in my Army Reserve unit was experienced in mail delivery. We were, in fact, an MP unit, and there were no law enforcement actions that we could perform - certainly we could not arrest the strikers.

But we could go to Post Office facilities and do, well, something. I never got inside one - my job was to drive a duce and a half - that’s a two and a half ton truck without power steering or brakes - filled with soldiers down the Long Island Expressway from the suburbs to New York City. And then, after a few hours, to drive them back.

As far as I know, no one actually delivered any mail. That’s what the papers said at the time.

But we went to the post offices, and we were able to go home each day. We could take a shower, have a good meal, get a good night’s sleep and be ready to report at the crack of dawn the next day.

And that’s not what is being reported, or explained, or even questioned about the President’s plan. Sending between 2,000 and 4,000 troops to help protect the border - they are supposed to support Border Patrol agents, not actually catch the people slipping across from Mexico - may seem like a good idea at first.

But, let’s ask some questions. Like where will they actually go and how long they will stay there. Like who will feed them and supply them with all the other things they need, from gasoline to the spare parts needed to maintain vehicles. Heck, helicopters have a precise and regular maintenance schedule. You replace this part every 100 hours of flying time, that one every 500 hours.

So, when you are setting up the military to do a job, you have to realize that only about 10 percent of the troops are on the front line. Much of the rest is a long tail of tactical support.

So, with 4,000 troops on the border, there is a good chance you are also committing 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 other men and women to keep them fed and supplied, healthy and properly clothed. You need someplace for them to sleep, unless they will all be in tents in the wilderness for two or three months, or six months or even six years. No one seems to have decided that yet.

I know. You don’t tell our plans to the enemy. You don’t say you want to be out of Syria in six months - wait, yes you do - but you certainly don’t tell National Guard troops how long they will be on a border support mission. Or their wives or husbands, or their bosses or their children. Or the bank that wants a mortgage paid on time. Or anyone else.

Hey, wait. Suddenly that strong and dramatic gesture seems to have some problems. Well, who ever thought that sending the army to support border patrol agents would be so hard.

Probably someone who once served in the army. I wonder if our President asked any of them.

No, I don’t.