Struggling American towns reflect 'wounded nation'
Recently, I drove from my father’s birthplace in Biddeford, Maine, to my mother’s birthplace in Petersburg, Virginia. Two different towns. Two different states. Two different regions. And yet, oddly, just different ends of the same sad street.
Most Americans now live at the same address: “We live where there used to be a factory. And when it shut down, what shot up was joblessness, hopelessness, meth, opioids, homicide and suicide.”
That is not just the story of one town. It is the story of a wounded nation.
Factories were never just factories. They gave whole towns their rhythm. They filled lunch pails and church pews. They paid the mortgage. They kept the corner store open. They let a mother or father look a child in the eye and say, “You can make it here.”
Then the factory closed. The people did not disappear.
They stayed. They stayed by the same schools, the same porches, the same churches, the same graves of the people who raised them. They stayed and watched storefronts empty, tax bases shrink and hope grow thin. Families are burying their too-young dead again and again. Meanwhile, the pundits who get rich dividing the nation keep working overtime.
The suffering caused by deindustrialization does not stop at racial lines, state lines or the old border between North and South. It reaches across most of the lines that people on television and social media work so hard to inflame. This one stokes racial resentment. That one blames immigrants. Another turns rural against urban, white against Black, native-born against newcomer. And most Americans suffer for it.
Divide and conquer has always been the surest way to blunt the ability of working families to rise together. It keeps our votes divided and canceling one another out.
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, the United States has lost well over 65,000 manufacturing plants and factories. NAFTA was not the only reason. Automation mattered. China mattered. Corporate consolidation mattered. But NAFTA still stands as a warning bell in our history. It reminds us what happens when we confuse what is good for corporate profits with what is good for the country.
Communities lose. The nation suffers.
Most Americans now live at the same address. They live in the places the economy left behind. They live where the factory closed, the jobs vanished and the pain stayed.
But there is a road to a better day.
We became a great nation because we planned. We looked ahead. We decided what we needed to build, what we needed to make, what kind of work would support families and what kind of country we wanted to become. Then we trained our people, built our strength and did the work.
We need that spirit again.
We need an industrial plan county by county, state by state and for the nation as a whole. We need to know what jobs will be needed 10 and 20 years from now, where they should be and how we will prepare our people to do them. Our schools are still too often preparing young people for an economy that is already gone. They need to do a better job preparing them for the jobs of the future. And as artificial intelligence starts doing more of the work people once thought would always need a person, we need to be ready to rethink the future for every worker and every community.
A nation is not a stock chart. A nation is not a quarterly report.
A nation is built on belief — belief in each other and belief in our future. And in America, we believe that if life has knocked you down, you deserve a chance to rise again.
Most Americans now live at the same address: “We live where there used to be a factory. And when it shut down, what shot up was joblessness, hopelessness, meth, opioids, homicide and suicide.”
The question is whether we will keep accepting that as normal. Or whether we will choose to love this country, our children and each other enough to make sure we all rise again.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.