Existential Ennui

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Tag Archives: Flint

How Did They Get That Way?

11 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by Sherry in Autobiography, Crap I Learned, fundamentalism, teabaggers

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

childhood, Flint, life as I see it, teabaggers

buickI grew up in Flint, Michigan.

Now you may not think much about that. One could say one grew up in Terra Haute or Bloomington and you might get the same sort of shrug–so what?

But some towns define people in a way others don’t.

Flint is a defining town. Flint is and always has been Buick Town. Flint was and is Detroit in miniature, always the little brother to the big guy, the one with acne and coke-bottle glasses. Say you were from Flint when someone from Detroit was around, and there would be instant snickering. (If you went to one of the big college towns to school, you know this all too well). If you were somebody in Flint, you were nobody anywhere else.

Mayfair District, Mt. Morris Township, Flint Michigan to be exact. You can buy a house two blocks from where I grew up for $18,000 bucks. Three bedroom, two-car garage and “completely remodeled”. That tells you most all you want to know about what has befallen Flint. Or this:

flint2Everybody I knew worked for GM one way or another. My dad did. My mother worked for AC Spark Plug. My uncle worked for AC. The neighbor across the street worked for Chevy I believe. All our parents worked “shifts”–1st, 2nd, or 3rd. Every three years a strike target was chosen and some of our parents walked picket lines until a new contract had been negotiated which would apply to all the “Big Three”.

Everybody belonged to the UAW. Everyone voted Democratic. Everyone was “down” for changeover, “laid off” for a couple of weeks while the factories retooled for the upcoming year’s new model. Everyone went to the unemployment office (and the numerous temporary satellites that were set up) and filed. Everybody got a couple of checks until they were “called back”. Everybody really went on vacation, but they dutifully signed the forms that they were “looking for work” and “available for work.” Everybody used the same 4-5 companies as their “places I looked for work last week.”

We were all white, all working class, all covered by insurance, paid vacations, with good sick time. We wore, mostly, decent clothes, drove cars that were within three years or so of being new, had yards to play in. We had mostly our own bedrooms or shared them with a sibling perhaps. We had “family rooms” in the basement which were paneled with “wood” and floored with linoleum, with a spare couch and a TV and an old fridge to keep pop and beer in.

We were not close to being rich but we were well-fed. We “shopped” at the Flint Plaza strip “mall”, seldom bought anything, but we always had enough for a coke and fries at Kresge’s. Our parents, (at least mine) wanted us to have a future that was beyond the “shop”. They sent us to college to be “something”, to have a better life than they had, and they didn’t find their life bad by any means.

When I reconnected with kids I went to high school with, I was in for a shock. While some were wonderful people, with compassion and deep concern about their fellow man and woman, a dumbfounding number had changed. They had gone into the shops, they had not strayed far from Flint, some even living in the very homes they grew up in.

Ours may have been the last generation who worked a full life in the shops. The first recession came in the 1970’s. Layoffs, real ones became normal, and “having seniority” was all that mattered. Increasing pressure from the newly created Asian brands made a first and only job until retirement, a thing of the past. I am not sure how many of my classmates put in their full 30 and retired, or how may were forced out, or took early retirements. But what had once been total security became something much less.

I was long gone, and my dad was long retired when most of this happened. I knew of it in Detroit, where there was less impact, but it was still a real one. People picked up and moved to other parts of the country where jobs were available.

But apparently a lot of kids I went to school with stayed. And they have made their life in a city that has fallen deeper and deeper into seediness. Flint continues to be the top of nearly everyone’s list as the most deadly place to live. It continues in the “little brother” syndrome, having all the worst traits of its big brother Detroit, and nary or hardly none its positives. No big league baseball or football. No growing film industry. No zoos, no gambling casinos. If I had to, I could not tell you, “if you ever get to Flint, make sure you see. . . .”, for there is no place to see.

And I start to read between the lines of comments on alumni pages on Facebook. Sometimes no even so much between, but seeing the ballyhoo for the “good old days” and “weren’t we something us Mighty Hawks”, and all the “remember the A & W!” as bespeaking a sadness of when times were good.

I started to see all the plaintive meme postings about “you’ll always be daddy’s girl” to daughters grown with children of their own, and lives of their own,  and “my greatest joy is when the phone rings and it’s you” as being what they are–the tell-tale signs of lives lived out in some perception of “is that all there is?” mentality. The anger at nephews who are scamming the system picking up food stamps while being able-bodied but not interested in working is apparent in the strident voice of the tea party “patriot” who hates that she works too hard while somebody, ANYBODY might get a free ride.

Another echoes that back in the day, when “we could stay out playing well after dark in the neighborhood”, where of course, now apparently that is not possible.  Yes, I know that was true, we walked everywhere at any time of night from each other’s homes with no thought to danger of any kind.

Because I went into the greater world, lived in other places, other states, other neighborhoods, I never saw my childhood life brought asunder by demographic changes, economic hard times, and how that all got twisted by a hundred voices all pointing the finger at someone else. The automobile industry blamed it on the unions, and the unions, on somebody else, and civil rights in the 60’s changed all those neighborhoods. There suddenly was no “black” part of town, nor “hispanic”. And as neighborhoods changed, the obvious change was color, though of course it had everything to do with economics and not race. But the “other” was born in those recessions.

And once working class Democrats became Reagan Democrats adopting the Southern strategy. It should never be forgotten that George Wallace did exceeding well in Michigan and especially in Detroit and Flint, carrying the primary there in 1972. Those angry white kids I went to school became natural Tea Party adherents by 2008. Angered by a city falling into ruin as GM spiraled into near bankruptcy,  and all that they held dear (the old neighborhood and school) changing radically, they expressed their ire, coupled with a goodly dose in some cases of old-fashioned biblical fundamentalism which serves all too often to bring out the absolute worst in people in a return to revolutionary fervor. Suddenly those that had been union members hated unions.

The recipe is simple. Stay where you grew up. Find yourself not doing as well as your parents did by and large. See your environment change and get much worse, destroying even your childhood memories, and most importantly have some group identify the problem not as economics but by blaming groups  of people as being responsible for your less than expected life.  Add a liberal dose of  fundamentalism which lends itself to “us vs them” analysis, and voilá, you have working class Democrats turned into working class Tea Party advocates, inexplicably voting against themselves. And why we can’t talk to each other unless we stick to “is Walli’s still up on Pierson Rd?”

That’s how it seems to me anyway.

flint3

Related articles
  • Well to do Michigan town doesn’t want to share its zip code with crime ridden Flint Michigan anymore (dailymail.co.uk)
  • Flint, Michigan’s Mirrored Memorial to the Foreclosure Crisis (gizmodo.com)
  • Flint ready to remove blighted homes (minbcnews.com)
  • Gov. Rick Snyder claims Flint retiree benefit cuts can keep police on streets of city his court brief calls ‘Murdertown’ (mlive.com)

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Let It Be A New Day

08 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by Sherry in Astronomy, Columbia, Editorials, Essays, fundamentalism, GOP, Humor, Individual Rights, Iowa, Islam, John McCain, Media, Muslim, Newt Gingrich, poverty, religion, Sarah Palin, Satire, teabaggers, terrorism, Voting, What's Up?

≈ 9 Comments

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911, Alvaro Uribe, Asteroids, astronomy, Cedar Rapids, Columbia, Detroit, Facebook, Flint, fundamentalism, Georgetown, GOP, Iowa, Islamic faith, journalism, Muslims, Qur'an, religion, right wing, tea party, tolerance, urban renewal, voters

Praise be to whatever Goodness speaks in your heart this day! In response to hatred, there is love being expressed, tolerance overflowing and men and women of good will gather in friendship.

A couple of important notices:

First, for those living near the environs of Cedar Rapids, IA, please take note that an interfaith “Day of Remembrance, Unity and Respect” is scheduled for 9/11 at 1-2:30 pm at the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids, 2999 1st Ave NW, Cedar Rapids, IA. Members of the Islamic faith, Judaic faith, and Christian faith will gather for a few words and prayer. Please come if you can to show your support for tolerance, and unity in recall of our time of tragedy.

If you cannot attend, please consider this Facebook call for unity and tolerance. Dr. James McGrath has created a FB page called, “read the Qur’an day.” Please go and sign up. We cannot remain silent in the face of the hatred being expressed by a tiny minority. We must speak out. We are a nation of immigrants. Tolerance is what defines us.

I caught this over at National Catholic Reporter. Fr. John Dear, SJ, has written a post on the sad but true fact that what can only be described as dictator, Columbia’s former president, Alvaro Uribe, has accepted a teaching position at Georgetown University. Fr. Dear has a good history of both Uribe and Georgetown’s questionable dealings with the American war machine in the past. This is truly sad to hear. I certainly don’t deny that Uribe has a right speak his piece about whatever, but I surely think there were better choices for teaching our youth than one who has had such a close connection to warlords and other murdering types.

I was born in Flint Michigan and lived a considerable number of years in Detroit, so I know of what I speak. Both are ugly decrepit cities and nothing much can save them I suspect. Both largely grew to magnificence (or some semblance of that) through the age of the Automobile, now both rust away as the heyday of automotive power wanes.  The Boston Globe has an interesting article on how these declining cities deal with this. How to downsize? (Note: recently Detroit decided to go forward with wholesale demolition of old neighborhoods long abandoned–thousands of homes are involved so I understand) A truly innovative look at a problem.

To those of us who pay attention, the Teapartiers have always been an anomaly. A conglomeration of mostly uninformed folk, who rant about “our freedoms” while having little or no clear thinking about what the Constitution says or means. Ironically they are often “for” things that are in-opposite to long-standing constitutional norms. In essence, they are often willing to eviscerate the Constitution in the name of upholding it. DeWayne Wickham at USAToday has a great article about the new KnowNothing Party.

Oh and before I forget, let my say this: This refusal of most of the “high-ranking GOP leadership (read Palin, Boehner, Gingrich et al) to condemn the Qur’an burning is disgusting and amounts to an endorsement. They are willing to allow their hate spewing followers to believe they favor it rather than have the guts to stand up for what is right. So much for ethics. But then who ever assumed they had any?

And we see that John Sidney McCain is criticizing the President for allowing the tax cuts for the rich to expire. Oh but, darn, McCain voted against them when Bush proposed them? How to reconcile this old fart? Just another one of your vengeful acts isn’t it John? You hated Bush for beating you, and you hate Obama for beating you. You need to go sit in your chair and muse about the dust bunnies in the wind.

If I hasn’t come to you yet, it will. Which came first: the insipid vapid (id words you see) moronic lack of intellect of the average American, thus requiring constant feeding of irrelevant nonsense, OR the increasing laziness of the journalistic working man and woman, who has traded actual journalistic skill for a few tips from Entertainment Nightly. Huh? Well, D-Cap tackles this one.

Christian Beyer is a fine writer and thinker and knows fundamentalist Christianity from the inside. See his blog entry today: It’s time for Christians to declare jihad against Fundamentalism. Just an excellent read.

Sad to say, but perfectly predictable, the right-wing and GOP are using the upcoming 9/11 date to raise money and spread hate. They have been doing it for years, and plan to continue it seems.

Ya know there is just plenty of crap to worry about. I worry a lot about that seething mega volcano just waiting to erupt in Yellowstone. That will take most all of us out. I worry about the state of our magnetic field, without which we will all be toast in days. Well, now I gotta worry about asteroids again! I thought we had that one all taken care of with an array of telescopes all searching for any misdirected balls of iron. (Jupiter with its super-massive gravity well is largely to blame–just so you know where to direct your ire.) Turns out NASA which runs this safety program is RUNNING OUT OF MONEY.

So I figure, we should perhaps set up a citizens brigade or something. You can leave your name and number and the night you would like to take your watch. Don’t push. Sharp eyes and a pair of field binoculars are required.

What’s on the stove: chili today. Oh I know it’s early, but I was hungry for some, and I made it really good and hot, and with some fresh corn bread. HA!

Related Articles
  • Islamophobia After 9/11: Enough, Already (beliefnet.com)

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