WHAT HAS CAUSED AMERICANS TO ATTACK THE CENTER OF OUR DEMOCRACY?

 

                                     …A typical Midwest meat packing operation

 

Could it be the reaction of a group of Americans that has been left behind?

 

I have been trying to find out what has been driving those people that were so tied to Donald Trump so tightly, and why?

As an example, there was a man that popped into the live TV feed of the riot last week inside one of the Capitol building that yelled “The government did this to us,” and then he disappeared as quickly as he had appeared.

What exactly did the government do to this man, or any of those Americans that were part of the many disgruntled that were in the attack on the nation’s Capitol.

As I began looking into what the man meant by “the government”, just what did the government do to this man…?

The more I dug into the situation it became obvious that this is not something that the government did recently, nor was it done to this man directly.

It appears to be what has changed in the American working man’s lives over a number of decades, and especially to those living in the great mid-west of the country.

And it is not that the government actually did something directly to any American.

To try to explain, we have to go back to what began back in the late 1950’s.  Yes the issues go back as far as that.

It appears that we should earnestly ask ourselves what that guy was talking about?  Because that guy apparently shares a perspective with millions of other Americans who think they somehow got cheated.

Well, in some ways, they probably have been cheated over the past half-century, while being fed a steady diet of baloney about those so called welfare queens and immigrant marauders.  This steady diet was in part, to keep the Midwest working class fighting amongst each other.

Here’s what appears to be the critical issues.

The average blue-collar manufacturing wage in the mid-west today is about $18 per hour, just barely enough to get by.  Those union jobs in the industrial heartland that once paid double that level, they are long lost to south-of-the-border or to China.  As an example, a number of towns in the mid-west were once manufacturing hubs, today they are half their size from 50 years ago.  The big capital today flows to both of the nation’s coasts.  Those in the nation’s heart-lands, they get left with the hogs and the manure that goes with them.

All of this has bred a resentment that fosters today’s racism and rage.  Jobs in the meatpacking industry today pay half what they did when I was in high school in the 1960’s.  Many immigrants have moved in, and the Anglos either bailed out for the big cities, or the high-tech valleys on the coasts.  Or they stayed behind, nursing their grudges, and some of them have gotten mad enough to grab a gun.

Desperation makes people crazy.  That appears to be the root of it. That, and White people afraid of losing their many privileges.   It took a madman like President Trump setting the spark amid a pandemic of disease and frustration.  The system in place for the past decades has again overplayed its hand, pitting the less educated white people against poor Black, brown and Native Americans.

President-elect Joe Biden now has an opportunity to grab us by the shoulders, shake us and challenge us to look at ourselves.  Georgia voters delivered control of the Senate to Biden’s party, but he will still need to speak to the disaffected who have been led to believe they are disenfranchised,  As always, it is the poor persons of color who is the one whose franchise is seriously at stake.

Biden campaigned on unifying the nation through shared prosperity and security for everyone, both for the rural and urban Black and White, men and women.  At the same time, our very existence is in peril from global warming.  Biden’s goal of transforming the economy to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is the principal cure.  He proposes a massive infrastructure program starting immediately to build out a wind and solar smart grid that will jolt economies from Appalachia to the Great Plains into a prosperity never before witnessed.  Is he correct, or is it all just a big pipe dream?

Will it work?  Let’s hope that it starts the country in the right direction and that he doesn’t get those like Mitch McConnell that will do whatever it takes to foil Biden’s goals.

These ideas of Biden’s are among the conclusions of a team of Princeton University energy experts who issued a December report about what it will take to save the planet from basically, overcooking.

Their plan: Farmers now growing corn for ethanol will be able to earn far more by growing grass to make hydrogen.  They say that high-paying jobs in renewable energy will quadruple from Iowa to Ohio to Georgia.  Texas is expected to morph into the carbon-holding and hydrogen-converting capital of the world.  West Virginia’s coal jobs will be replaced by people making jet fuel from hemp or switchgrass.   All of this is without giving up an acre currently devoted to food production.  They say we can “feed and power the world sustainably.”  True?  Who knows?

They say the Southeast can be reforested. Coal and fracking jobs in Pennsylvania and Ohio will be replaced and expanded by solar and wind. Underground storage and pipelines to transport carbon dioxide and hydrogen will be built from the Industrial Midwest to the Gulf Coast.

Yes, this would put the places forgotten by time, back into the center of the nation’s action. Corporations know what is coming and they say they are lining up.  Cargill, Xcel Energy, General Mills, and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission are ready to profit from the “Great Transition.”

Somebody making $75,000 in Arkansas producing biofuel is far less likely to waste time protesting today’s phony election fraud.

It’s high time this nation brought everyone along. That means civil rights for the Blacks, Native Americans and immigrants of all faiths. 

As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. knew, there is no real justice without economic justice.

It really is the only path forward for the American experiment and for the planet.  Bring those towns in Iowa, and Michigan and Ohio, long ignored and deplored, into the Great American economic juggernaut.

That appears to be one way we can deal with the resentments of those Americans that feel like the man that said: “The government did this to us!”

Copyright G. Ater 2021