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.