"Let fury have the hour, anger can be power,
D'you know that you can use it?"
-The Clash, "Clampdown"
Driving over the hill to Elmira for work has been revelatory for Peg, and indirectly for me.
The patient pool just down the street at Corning-Guthrie tends to be fit, relatively healthy, and universally insured. Many if not most work for Corning, Inc., and are well educated and well paid. Their pass through the operating room might be to replace a worn out knee or the like, repairing the consequences of a vigorously led life.
Almost every patient to our east has a BMI in excess of forty, with some as high as sixty-plus. They are disabled, mostly unemployed, and nursing the consequences of bad diets, cigarettes, and booze. It is unclear who's paying for their surgeries, given that none have any sort of insurance. They are pathetically grateful for the kindnesses of those responsible for their care. They smell horrible.
P came home from that world last night, and we walked down to the Radisson to sit outside on a perfect shirtsleeve evening and listen to live music with the Corning crowd. A product rep Peg knows from both hospitals swings by for a visit while we sip a drink and enjoy a plate of pot stickers. I peruse the real estate ads and find some acreage up on Seneca Lake that might make a nice homesite.
Our lives, and the lives of everyone out on that patio, are so far removed from the squalor and misery all around us that it's easy to lose sight of what is happening, here and all over this country.
The Southern Tier of New York, those counties strung horizontally along the Pennsylvania border, was once a manufacturing powerhouse, dotted with factories and mills, railroads bringing in raw materials and sending back down to the City finished goods for sale. Now it's mostly gone, but the descendants of those factory workers who raised their families in this beautiful place are still here, eating and smoking and boozing themselves to an early grave.
It's much the same in Perry, where the mill employs less folks every year, and the ones they hire are paid a fraction of the generation they've replaced, an act of stewardship of the shareholders' dividends that leaves the town a little poorer, a little sadder. But for the rising tide of interstate immigration into Florida that seems to be creeping north from Homosassa, TayCo would be every bit as hopeless as the boarded up little towns in the adjoining valleys up here.
Corning is, of course, an island in all this misery, a place that allows one to experience the America we could be if we lived up to our principles. The corporation stayed, stuck it out and paid its taxes and its workers, invested in its people, schools, and infrastructure. What they created in this little space on the banks of the Chemung is a community where workers are able to support their families, where playing by the rules carries the rewards of meaningful work and attendant self-respect, where out of all this abundance flows kindness and generosity.
The contrast is reflected in the politics of the region. Steuben County voted over 70% for Trump in 2020, the same as back home in Bay County. Corning voted the mirror image of our neighbors in the hills. Looking at the lives of the folks in the polling booth sheds some light on why that might be. Revanchism apparently doesn't seem so bad, despite the racism and misogyny rolled into the message, to someone who grew up watching a parent or a grandparent leave home each morning to work a good job, with real food in the pantry and the implicit promise of a better life for each generation. Who wouldn't want to roll back the clock and live that life, when the current moment means squalor, addiction, and a manifest loss of self-respect?
It's easy enough to cast a disdainful eye at these poor souls. And in fact there's a segment of Trump World who are rightly despised, those of our own socioeconomic class who cynically manipulate their poor neighbors with visions of transsexual bogeymen and brown people pouring over our borders as a means of distracting from the real sources of their misery. But the problem on the other side of the aisle seems to lie in dismissing the vast majority of the far right as ignorant or bigoted, which is an easier stance than acknowledging their suffering and trying to address the problem in a meaningful way.
But maybe there's good news in the global instability of late; maybe we'll bring home all those jobs lost years ago to the low bidder on another continent that may become inaccessible or politically repellent as the Pax Americana crumbles before our eyes. There are towns from here to the Pacific and back full of people who would love to manufacture something and get paid for it. This time in history feels like one of crisis, but as John F. Kennedy famously and incorrectly observed decades ago, the Chinese word for "crisis" combines "danger" and "opportunity". If his translation was flawed, the observation about human affairs feels right. Interesting times.
Time to work a little, grateful that someone will pay me for the effort.
Comments