Decline

I’m still in very red Dakota, and I attended a couple of family events this weekend, which got me thinking about decline. The small town where I grew up is in clear decline. There were three locally-owned grocery stores here when I was growing up, plus a smaller bodega-type store, and a good meat market. Now we’re down to one family-owned grocery store, another that was just bought out (and is clearly not as good) and the meat market. Even though this is beef country, beef is expensive, and they grocery stores are selling odd cuts of meat that I’ve never heard of before (because they were probably just ground up into hamburger before meat prices skyrocketed).

Part of the issue better opportunities elsewhere, and part of it is due to the drip, drip, drip of rural decline. For example, the schools here, like most in the region, can’t hire STEM teachers, so most of that instruction is done over video. The opportunity reason is that people (mostly women) who would previously been teachers can now find better jobs. The decline part is that teachers don’t want to live in this little town because they can’t find housing, and many of the amenities that people living in bigger towns take for granted no longer exist here, if they ever did.

It took decades for this town to get where it is now. The decline was gradual — drip, drip, drip. There wasn’t a natural disaster that destroyed a bunch of buildings, then everyone realized that there weren’t enough people who had the resources and energy to rebuild. It’s more like a house that nobody’s re-painted or re-decorated.

Unfortunately for the country, the decline we’re experiencing isn’t the gentle decay that experienced by the rural plains roughly 75 years. When a place is going through a slow decline, people can adjust or just move away. Instead, MAGA is running this country into the dirt, quickly and violently. And it’s going to take a long time to recover, if we ever do.