PUTNEY — Donald Trump was elected. No surprise to me. I saw it coming 10 years ago when I went to Maquoketa, Iowa, to study with renowned artist Rose Frantzen.
Maquoketa, just like so many towns in the East, had lost its longtime factory to China. You could have slept on the macadam of the main street all night without a car running over you.
As I recall, Rose had bought the Town Hall for less than $20,000 and a large church for about the same. Her attempt was to create an “art town” and save the economy for her neighbors.
Factories in the towns I knew as a child in New England have been crumbling as well, and some have been turned into condos, art studios, malls, or even art museums.
But generations of factory workers who sustained the economy of these towns have been turned out to forage for menial work, along with farmers who could not make more payments to the banks.
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I drove across country twice this past year on mostly secondary roads. I saw the same hellish struggle everywhere.
Towns that were vibrant and healthy when my husband Tom and I made our three-month drive in 1990 “to see how America was doing” are just plain gone now. Empty. Boarded up.
Many are peppered with crack houses, the drugs a source of income and of escape. Generations of hard-working people have been sold out by the U.S. government.
The culprits are not incoming Mexicans, but greedy industrialists moving jobs to Mexico, to China, to India, and to anyplace else they can find workers for a cheap buck and no overtime.
This policy is facilitated by the indifference to workers demonstrated by our own government. Today, our working people, my people (both my granddads were farmers), are desperate and angry, and many are looking for a head to chop off.
Must be gays. Must be Muslims. Must be intellectuals. Has not this scenario happened again and again in history?
Yes.
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Here in the United States, where free speech is a right, public speaking is the number-one fear of most Americans. This fear leads to passivity.
“This is just the way things are these days,” we say.
People are very passive out of fear. And lazy. And clueless if they never get off the highway in small-town America, clueless if they do not look at the origin tags on their purchases.
To disempower and starve workers is to empower demagogues. The vegetables in the fields charge no more for their fruits, roots, and leaves than they did in the beginning of time.
How is your wallet? What happened? Who did it?
Have a mirror handy.
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In this election, there were two doors to choose from. Behind one was the lady; the other, the tiger.
I did not vote for Donald Trump - one word, “unqualified,” explains my thoughts on that choice.
With failing hope, despite that Hope is a town in Arkansas, I voted for the only other option.
A door opened. A tiger smiled in the darkness. A tiger that saw the door latch in the night.
The day after the election, the sun rose again. The sky may be falling, or at least snow will be falling. Cold days are coming, that is sure.
But somehow I think things are heating up.