Every
six months or so a list of the “20 Drunkest Cities in America” makes the rounds
and every six months I am overcome by anger and sadness over it.
It’s
posed as a joke, and shared as a source of pride. Most of the cities are in
Wisconsin, and all but one is in the Midwest. The city I use to explain where I’m
from is on the list. I don’t know how accurate it is, if it’s based on any
evidence at all, or where it came from, but outlets like Barstool Sports love
to share it over and over again among the other asinine content they post.
People
from my high school—and plenty from college, too—love this stuff, wear it as a
badge of honor.
Maybe
it’s because I’m a curmudgeon or maybe it’s because I’ve been forced to get to
know all the worst parts of myself, but I can’t help but wish for a little more
self-awareness. When I think of the Midwest, I think of all the idiosyncrasies
that make it special, but also the complicated bits that make it, like any
other region, unique. And I think it’s the complicated stuff that bears
mentioning here.
The Midwest has a lot of fun nicknames: the Bible Belt, the flyover states, America’s Heartland, the Breadbasket, the Grain Belt, Middle America. They all conjure imagery of charmingly dopey farmers, too nice and very simple and maybe even a little primitive in nature (and totally ignorant of the skill and knowledge it takes to farm successfully). Those nicknames gloss over the sociopolitical and metaphysical complexity that makes the Midwest just like any other region of the world, and I think that does us a great disservice.
In Watchmen, there’s a passage from Hollis Mason’s book about his childhood in Montana. And although Montana is more West than Middle, I think the observation applies.
One of the things that [my grandfather] took great pains to impress upon me was that country folk were morally healthier than city folk and that cities were just cesspools into which all the world’s dishonesty and greed and lust and godlessness drained and was left to fester unhindered. Obviously, as I got older and came to realize just how much drunkenness and domestic violence and child abuse was hidden behind the neighborly façade of some of those lonely Montana farmhouses, I understood that my grandfather’s appraisal had been a little one-sided.
I
wanna talk about climate.
Everyone
knows people who live near the North Pole suffer through stretches of time
where there’s nothing but darkness, day and night, and that wreaks havoc on
their mental health. The same is true, to an extent, for people who endure
long, harsh winters. As far as I can tell, seasonal depression is as common an
undiagnosed epidemic as anxiety. There were days last winter where my partner
and I were physically confined to our home, either because it was dangerously
cold outside or the snow was up to our waists. For nearly a full week school
was cancelled and I was working very few hours, so we sat in the apartment and
went stir crazy while plows tried to clean things up and the sun fought to warm
us a little. It was miserable. It was easily the hardest winter of my life, and
we didn’t even get the worst of it.
When
the sun finally came out in the spring, even thirty degrees felt like a gift. When
we got an April blizzard just like the one that crippled us the year before, I thought
I might have a serious mental break. I couldn’t stand to look out at the gray
skies and filthy snow anymore. I hated feeling like every time I got in my car I
might skid out of control into oncoming traffic.
Then,
when we were finally in the clear, all that snow and ice meant disastrous
flooding, wiping away any relief some people had because they spent all spring
bailing water out their basements and fighting with insurance companies and incurring
debt over the whole thing.
To
my mind, there’s no way people can go through this cycle year after year—and
generation after generation, the weather becoming more extreme as time goes on—and
not suffer some kind of blow to their mental health. Add onto that the
financial stress of property damage—or even medical bills to treat depression!—and
you’ve got yourself a solid eight months of misery. I’ve been on
antidepressants for years, so I can’t imagine how shitty I’d have felt without
that extra serotonin to help me out.
I
wanna talk about vice.
So
the mental health thing is a factor, for sure. And when it goes untreated, or
even when treated, it very often leads to self-medication of some destructive
kind or another. For a lot of people it’s drinking. It warms the bones when it’s
cold out and it dulls the sharp edges of stress and it makes you just hazy
enough to feel good or maybe not feel anything at all. It’s an escape from what’s
shitty. And on top of that, it’s addictive, so it feeds into a cycle of
financial and mental health and physical health and employment problems. Do you see where I’m going with this?
It’s
not always drinking, of course. A lot of people gamble, especially since the
Midwest is home to a ton of different indigenous groups whose main source of
income comes through casinos. (I don’t even have the time or knowledge to touch
on the ways indigenous peoples suffer here in the Midwest and all over the
world.) So gambling feeds into those financial and mental health problems and
the escapism that so quickly becomes destructive to people who don’t know how
to or simply don’t want to address how they feel.
Then
there’s the opioid crisis, which plagues people all over the place regardless
of race or status or creed. Addiction doesn’t discriminate, but especially in
places lacking in resources, it runs rampant.
I
wanna talk about agribusiness.
The
Breadbasket and America’s Dairyland have changed dramatically and in such a way
that has left family farms decimated by corporate buyouts or the struggle to
compete with huge agribusinesses. John Steinbeck wrote whole novels about how
the corporatization of agriculture ruined the people and the land where he grew
up in California, and the same is true here in the Midwest.
Similarly,
the once booming automotive industry in Michigan is now just starting to
recover from economic collapse, and paper mills across the Midwest and Canada
are shuttering rapidly. Logging and mining in the Upper Peninsula, once driving
the economy, have all but disappeared and left sad, lonely towns in their wake.
I’d
be foolish to act like any of these industries could have gone on as they were
into the 21st century without any repercussions. We know now that
clear-cutting entire forests is disastrous, and that mining is wildly dangerous
and unsustainable, anyway. But where once generations lived and died and raised
their families around these industries, they’re now left with nothing. The work
has been shopped out overseas because it’s cheaper, or to South America where
our government seems to think we have the right to exploit resources. What once
sustained millions of families has both drained our region of resources and
left families on their asses. Whether it’s the result of a lack of foresight or
unchecked greed or both, it’s the reality here, and you can still see it in
hundreds of ghost towns across the Midwest that were once bright and thriving.
I
wanna talk about the sociopolitical divide.
It’s
nothing new, although sometimes it feels like folks are more emboldened now
than ever before. The Midwest is funny because it’s full of blue-collar, hard-working
people who just want to be treated “fairly” and take ownership of what’s
theirs, but who have been so brutalized by politicians that they’re left
pointing fingers at each other. When once the democratic party was that of the
working man, the idea of liberty and justice for all—yes, all—seems to have become too radical for a lot of Midwesterners.
And
I hate it, but I get it on a level that I think comes from understanding the
Midwest very deeply.
I
wanna talk about resources.
By
now you’ve seen the maps Turning Point USA has shared about the Electoral
College. In an attempt to explain why the Electoral College is good, the maps actually do a terrific
job of illustrating why it makes no fucking sense. Anyway, the idea is that
boatloads of people live on the east and west coast in tiny little geographical
sections of the US, while a similar number of people are spread over the
Midwest and the plains and everywhere that’s not New York and LA. Because all the
largest, most profitable industries are in those coastal cities, that’s where
all the wealth and resources are amassed, leaving the majority of Americans
with little to nothing.
Certainly,
big metropolitan areas have their fair share of resource problems, but the idea
is that the resources are there, just
inequitably shared. That’s true for the country as a whole, except instead of a
neighborhood plagued by poverty and teeming with gentrification, it’s whole
enormous states full of people struggling to get by because their industries
have been sold out for cheap labor and nobody wants to move to and invest in
those places.
America
has, like, shitloads of money. For the most part, all the top universities are
on the coasts, Ivy Leagues full of people whose families have had shitloads of
money for generations and generations, and have given shitloads of money to
very wealthy Ivy League and companies schools for generations and generations,
where those resources are needed least. And for generations and generations,
Ivy League grads have started hedge funds and tech and online shopping
companies that make shitloads of money off the backs of working people and
redistribute next to none of the wealth to said working people. Then those
hedge fund and tech company owners give their money to the political candidates
who make it possible for them to keep paying pennies for the labor that made
them exorbitantly wealthy while also not
paying taxes to see that their laborers can, like, go to a doctor. See the
problem here?
And
the problem here, aside from all the exploitation, is that these working people
can’t just leave and find a better job. They work these jobs because they pay
the best, even if the best isn’t a livable wage. They have kids to feed and
bills to pay and, for many, cannot risk going somewhere they’d be treated less
shitty for lower pay. And it isn’t because they’re not smart or because they
made bad decisions—it’s because some jackass born in Connecticut wants another
boat and has zero fucking humanity. This business practice of employing
desperate people and keeping them desperate ensures that those people’s
families for generations and generations will never be able to challenge
jackasses from Connecticut. It all but guarantees that a factory worker will
not be able to afford to send her child to college, so that child will spend
his life earning minimum wage doing jobs that are considered “unskilled”
because he doesn’t have a degree, and the same will probably happen to his
children. So, no, the promise of jobs, like the ones Foxconn was supposed to
bring Wisconsin, is not enough.
I
wanna talk about fear.
When
basically nobody has a pot to piss in and everyone is working themselves to the
bone and the majority of us are suffering from mental illness and addictions as
a result, it’s no wonder we start feeling shitty about ourselves and others. When
the problem is really with bosses paying low wages and offering terrible
medical benefits to save money for themselves, people start to look at their
peers and wonder why they’re doing a little better than themselves even though
they’re in the same situation. Instead of asking, “Why is my boss allowed to
pay me pennies?” people find themselves asking, “Why does my neighbor get food
stamps but not me?”
It
becomes a matter of pride. We come from generations of mostly eastern European
farmers and peasants who probably came to America in hopes of a “better life”
for their families. And coming from war-torn countries and backbreaking work,
they passed along the ailments of hardship: depression, anxiety, addiction,
pride, intergenerational trauma. The American myth of pulling oneself up by one’s
bootstraps and working to make the life you desire is just that: a myth. And the inequity is not among our
peers, but at the top. Somehow, many Midwesterners fail to see it. I think they
would rather believe their neighbors are liars than cheaters than believe that
they have been manipulated by people in power.
And so we’re left with this concoction of bitterness where we can’t say “I’m sorry” or “I need help” or “I was wrong.” This is where it’s gotten us, but still nobody seems willing to try something different. Something’s gotta give. We’re suffering by our own hand, while the shithead president gets to go on television or Twitter while he’s pulling the strings on our arms and ask, “Why are you hitting yourself?”
Because, as you may have noticed, my writing is often influenced by my reading, I’m going to start including some recommended reading with my posts. Take a peek at previous posts for my reading recommendations. For this week, check these out:
Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Self-Sabotage”:
Tell Me How it Ends: An
Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli
Watchmen by Alan Moore
“When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before’” by Clint Smith
“The Harvest Gypsies” by John Steinbeck
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
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