A world not returning
In the blue-collar town where I grew up in Northern/Central California, most young men went to work in the paper or steel mills or chemical factories shortly after high school graduation.
The mills and factories were union. They paid fairly well and provided good benefits, and if you had a father or uncle who worked at one, there was a good chance you could be hired, too. Some young men from our town joined the military for a few years or went to community college for a bit, but the manufacturing plants always beckoned.
With the money made, you could buy a nice little house to raise your family. Weekends were spent hunting, fishing, drinking and watching sports. If you got tired of working at one of the mills/factories, you could fake a back injury – hard to disprove, right? – and go on disability for as long as the ruse would last. Then you went back to work at the plant. You took a comfortable retirement in your late 50s/early 60s to a life of fishing, hunting and being around the grandkids.
That life mostly doesn’t exist anymore. The mills and factories around my hometown are either closed or their workforces have been severely reduced. Many guys I grew up with lost their manufacturing jobs decades ago, and with only a high school education, the pickings for new employment were slim.
On top of all of that, these men now had to go to grocery stores that had Asian sections. Now their doctor was from Pakistan. Now their neighbor blasted banda music in his backyard every weekend. Now their wives made more money than they did. And for the last year they’ve been told they had to wear masks in public. This simply was not the world they were expecting to live in when they were strong young bucks in high school with guaranteed future employment.
The town where I grew up was a mix of Dust Bowl refugees, Italian-Americans (mostly Sicilian), Mexican-Americans, Portuguese-Americans, Filipino-Americans and a few Blacks. People generally got along, largely because almost all of us were lower middle-class to poor and the unions in the plants where dads worked pushed camaraderie among union members.
So when people say the Trump-inspired movement is largely based on racial animus, I don’t completely agree. The racism no doubt involved in the movement is not targeted at individuals of different colors/ethnicities, some of whom they actually might like, as much as that nebulous, multi-colored mass they see taking over their country.
Donald Trump, the bloated, trashtalking, wannabe macho man, is merely their vessel for their grievances. Trump is like their mayor, football coach or boss back in the 1970s-1980s. He’s the big shot many secretly aspired to be someday but never became.
I’m still in touch with many of my boyhood friends. I hear their complaints, their conspiracy theories. I try to counter their claims, but they don’t want to hear it, at least not from me. Many imply – some even outright say -- with my job teaching at a university and my writing career, I’m a traitor to my blue-collar, football-playing roots. They don’t dislike me because they’ve known me since we were kids, but they’re convinced I can’t identify with their world anymore. And maybe, as much as I try, I can’t fully empathize with their frustrations because I didn’t follow their path.
Today we will see the inauguration of a new president. Many such men are angry about that, and some are going to continue to loudly object. Some will even get violent.
That’s because they want the world they feel they were promised, way back when, to return. And they are going to continue fighting to get it back, even if that world is gone for good.
Bret Kofford teaches writing at San Diego State University-Imperial Valley and is a screenwriter. His opinions don’t necessarily reflect those of SDSU or its students. Kofford can be reached at kofford@roadrunner.com.