Travel abroad, in your own country

Sheriff Dan McClain knew little of the opioid epidemic in this depressed corner of southern Indiana when he took office in 2011, but he has since had a crash course in how easy it is to get pain prescriptions that lead to addiction, and how supposedly tamper-proof opiate medications are cooked down and shot up. Lives unravel. The jail he oversees just off the sleepy Main Square is a combination of “mental health facility, rehab facility and straight-up incarceration.”

McClain was a member of the Navy SEALs for 13 years; seeing friends killed in the Middle East, he was consoled by pride in his country. But now he sees an America adrift. Morals declined along with pain thresholds. Medications spread; stoicism sagged. “What happened to self-respect and taking responsibility?” he asks me. “People used to be ashamed to get on welfare or social programs. Now they don’t have to work, they get housing and groceries, and they’re bored. With nothing to do they do drugs. At least that’s my best swing at it.”

Scott County is Trump country. For McClain that’s because “he brought American pride to the surface again.” The president won 67 percent of the vote here in November. A few weeks into his presidency, I found support at near fever pitch. Trump was shaking things up. He was putting moral standards back. He was the most honest president in a long time because he was doing what he said he would do. He has recruited billionaires to his Cabinet who know how to create jobs. He was out to win big and to heck with measuring every word.

“I like Trump, he’s a brilliant man,” Bill Graham, the affable eight-term Republican mayor of Scottsburg, told me. “It might be better if he didn’t open his mouth so quickly, but he’s going to challenge a broken system. In the end, it’s about morals. We’re not going to let somebody run God out of our country.”

I was a foreign correspondent for many years, work that involves the shedding of assumptions and absorption in place. To see what’s over here, you have to let go of what’s over there. Scott County, for coastal metropolitan Americans, is a foreign land. In a fissured nation, there are fewer and fewer moments of genuine encounter between rival tribes, each confined in its ideological canyon. So what could bring the country together, usher Brooklyn closer to Scottsburg?

Perhaps the best bet is a vastly expanded, even mandatory, national service program that might at once throw Americans of every creed and culture together for a year or two at an impressionable age, fire up civic engagement and even revive the American dream.

If Trump is serious about rekindling America’s spirit, a GI Bill for civilian national service would go a lot further than the 10 percent increase in military spending he’s seeking in his first budget. It would offer patriotic substance instead of perilous nuclear braggadocio. If “Where did you do your service year?” replaced “Where did you go to college?” as a reflex question, the United States might begin to heal.

About a million Americans have passed through AmeriCorps since its establishment a little over two decades ago, and some 80,000 are serving at any one time. They do things like provide disaster relief, teach coal miners coding, help veterans write résumés, educate young people about the opioid epidemic and generally patch holes in America’s fraying social fabric.

In doing so, they get to solve problems with people very different from themselves. Liza Dyer, now 31, described her time in AmeriCorps a few years ago in Washington state. “People were coming in with very different belief systems, and my job wasn’t to just talk at them, but to really listen to what they were coming in with and build on that without judging them,” she said.

In return, they get a living allowance and, currently, around $5,800 to pay for higher education. They also get a leg up at more than 450 companies that have agreed to prioritize hiring national service alumni.

Demand exceeds funding. Appropriations for the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal body that oversees programs, have stalled; its annual budget of $1 billion (supplemented by grants from the private sector) represents a tiny fraction of federal spending. “A really scaled-up national service program is an idea that’s perfect for where we are as a country,” AnnMaura Connolly, the president of Voices for National Service, told me.

But Trump seems to be moving in the opposite direction, despite traditionally strong Republican support for national service. AmeriCorps is on a draft White House budget office list of programs the president might eliminate to get to “small government.” And Trump has not yet appointed anyone to head the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Boasts of restored national greatness and $54 billion of additional military might will not help Scott County. Nor will the Dow at 21,000. It’s another corner of America where most low-skill manufacturing jobs have vanished.

Last year, I traveled to Hazard, a hard-hit coal town in Kentucky, and found many of the same issues (as well as the same fervid Trump support). It turns out that this area of Indiana is sometimes called Little Hazard because so many destitute Appalachian families came here decades ago to work in factories. Why here? Because it’s where a single tank of gas would get you.

Those jobs are now gone, along with good unions and retirement benefits. Precariousness has become a way of life. When an HIV outbreak occurred in 2015 just up the road from Scottsburg in Austin, it was a sign of what poverty and desperation could spawn in a sleepy rural community. A big-city disease, as locals viewed it, was not meant to erupt in a Hoosier backwater, population 4,200.

Brittany Combs, a public health nurse whose grandfather came from Hazard, told me addicts had been using ditch or toilet water for needles sharpened with nail files and shared by 15 people. Vice President Mike Pence, then governor of Indiana, agonized over how to respond. Possession of a needle without a prescription was illegal, but HIV cases kept doubling. Should pragmatism outweigh principle? Pence turned to prayer before eventually authorizing the clean needle exchange that brought the epidemic under control. “He had to pray a lot to allow it,” said Jackie Crane, another public health nurse whose son overdosed on heroin last year and almost died.

Alan Khazei, a social entrepreneur based in Boston, knows about such depressed US towns from his mother, whose relatives lived in Rust Belt Pennsylvania. He knows about the American dream through his father, who fled Iran in the 1950s and became a distinguished physician. He has an idea to revive both.

The 1944 GI Bill provided cash payments for tuition and other benefits to more than 2 million returning veterans; it was paid back many times over through what these educated veterans subsequently brought to the US economy. Khazei would like to see a similar bill for today’s youth. Put $5,000 into a savings account for every child born – about 4 million of them a year – for a cost of about $20 billion (or double that if it were $10,000). With compound interest over 18 years, that would grow into a significant sum that could be used toward payment for college. Then make the money available on condition of a year of national service.

“We’d be saying, if you serve your country between the ages of 18 and 28, we’ll jump start you on your American dream,” Khazei told me. He believes that with serious investment, even before such a program came to fruition, there could be a million Americans in civilian national service by the country’s 250th anniversary, in 2026.

It’s worth a try. The case for a Cabinet-level position for national service is persuasive. American fracture is advancing by the day because Americans are no longer obliged to look one another in the eye and find solutions.

So far, Trump’s administration has only sharpened divisions. Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, seems to see red rural states as the essence of the “American spirit” and places like New York and Los Angeles as centers of internationalist dilution and defeatism. On the coasts, meanwhile, red state attraction to Trump is a source of fathomless mystery.

Kellyanne Conway, a senior Trump adviser, once used a bowl to illustrate the administration’s strategy during a breakfast with an acquaintance of mine: The rim was all the pointy-headed peripheral coastal types; the meat was in the deep middle, the heartland, where Trump claims a special bond with “the people” whose “voice” he is. For all the sops to unity – “We all bleed the same blood” – in Trump’s speech Tuesday to a joint session of Congress, this is an administration ready to fan division if it sustains the fire of a mass movement wedded to its leader.

The people of Scott County are mainly Trump supporters, but they are not waiting for his help. Plenty of volunteers are coming together to seek solutions to the region’s problems. Lori Croasdell, who heads marketing for the Scott County Partnership, a nonprofit organization dedicated to community revival, spoke to me of “a culture of recovery.” The HIV crisis had been a wake-up call. Addiction is being destigmatized, help and education made more accessible. Croasdell spoke with a group of women all devoting their creative energies to breaking the cycle of poverty and drugs. One, Jamie Raichel, told me she used to work in schools on dropout prevention. Her employer never knew she’d become addicted herself to prescription opiates. But she broke the habit; it will be seven years this month, she said, tears welling.

That is the real – and unifying – American spirit.