Reaping What We've Sown

This is one of those entries that I am sort of hoping will not be read by many people. The reason for this is twofold. First, I am not an expert in the subject matter. I am liable to not only be imprecise but perhaps judgmental as well. Second, it is not going to be particularly entertaining. It is going to take some time and words to explain some of this so the entry is likely to be long. I hope this is enough to deter the playful readers. At the same time, for those who have perhaps been thinking about this stuff, I hope that my comments here make some sense.

For some time now, small towns have been diminishing across our country. Small-town businesses have lost market share to big-box stores. Local restaurants have been replaced by cookie-cutter chains. Family farms have been sold or taken over and ultimately converted into large-scale, corporate production models. Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs in America have been drying up and/or moving overseas. Initially these were primarily blue-collar jobs. More recently, however, more technical positions have been farmed out as well. All this has been going on for some time but it has gone largely unnoticed or at least unconcerned by much of the population that has found refuge and success in cities and suburbs.

So blind were many professionals to all this that they were actually surprised when the economic crises reached them a couple of years ago. I remember coming to St. Francis and hearing nothing but bullish reports. No matter how bad things were getting outside Charlotte (see the history of textiles, furniture and tobacco), the people here seemed unfazed and exuberantly confident about the future. It was only when the banks failed and the handwriting was on the wall that many urban and suburban professions began to admit that the suffering might actually reach them.

Of course, at this point, all of this is old news. There is no going back and "preparing" for what has already come to pass. However there is still a future out there. There is still something on the horizon--something that we might want to begin thinking about before it reaches us and there is no longer anything that we can do about it...

Before I explain what I suspect is on the horizon, I want to draw attention to something--perhaps an unlearned lesson from the past: It seems to me that the reason we are where we are now is because the people of the cities and suburbs refused to understand that their lives were connected to the people in the hinterlands and small towns of this land. That is, as long as things were going well here, they didn't give much thought to how things were going out there. In fact, it would seem that many professionals carried on as though those other places and people didn't even exist. It seemed to me very much an attitude of "as long as I get mine..." Even during the so-called "boom years," there was a lot of suffering out there but most people paid it absolutely no mind.

So what might we learn from this? It seems to me that we need to understand that a person who lives in a different place and carries on at a different pace might just be our best friend. Some people don't need a 5,000 square foot house. Some people don't need a high profile job. Some people don't want to live in the city. But they still want to be free. They still want to have a life and be able to make a living and have some autonomy in their lives.

As long as we are competing with people like this, professionals are probably going to be able to get what they want. Which is kinda nice. Some people want the small town experience; others want a more fast-paced, urban life. That's what was economically good about the twentieth century. There was enough room and enough opportunity to go around. The competition fit the variety and the labor force well enough to keep most people satisfied.

When things began to change and globalization was initially breaking in, it seemed an even better situation for those who were able to benefit from it. Though it might have been tough on the hinterlands, professionals saw the advantage of farming out all those blue-collar jobs. Cutting costs was good for the corporations and those who were able to invest in them. While once the privilege of only the very wealthy, suddenly middle-class people were able to enjoy the miracle of passive income. Capitalizing on all that labor was profitable. Globalization was good...

But here is the thing... What happens as the competition increases--not just a little but exponentially? What happens when other hungry wolves catch a whiff of all this? It is one thing to compete with a couple hundred thousand farmers and small-town business owners who don't really want what you want anyway. It is another thing to compete with a billion people who are actually more driven than you.

You see, what is happening now is that this is all catching on. It is no longer just the labor money. The people that I am talking about are not interested in cutting your lawn or saving you a couple of bucks an hour. These people have come for the real jobs. They're sending their sons and daughters over here at a pace that we have yet to comprehend. And they are coming with an intentionality that makes even driven professionals look lazy. Take a look at the lists of valedictorians. Stop by an ER or a pharmacy. Look at the students that are going into accounting and finance... These are not people who came from rural North Carolina.

My point is not racist or nationalistic. It is simply to draw our attention to the horizon. The world is moving and it is moving against urban professionals in exactly the kind of way that it once moved against farmers and small-town business folk.

It is far too late to stop all this. And it would probably be wrong to do so anyway. However, I do imagine that we need to approach the future differently than we handled the past. That is, it seems to me that our lives are far more connected to our neighbor than we might now understand. The freedom and quality of life of all those farmers and small-town business folk is intricately tied to our own.

The economic world that we have known was closely tied to a political world that offered a quality of life to the individual that was somewhat independent of how much that individual earned. I think that this is important--something that we would want to hold on to. Many of the people who are now competing for the jobs of the future are coming from places that are less like this land in that regard. I do not know that this will matter but I suspect that it will. These people are coming from places that are also less inclined to tolerance. I fret to consider a world where the people at the top have little or no regard for those at that bottom.