A picture of my co-workers and me on the last day before final layoffs began.
This year I started a new job after the company I worked at
for over twenty years, Manitowoc Cranes, packed up and moved from the city for
which it was named. I now work with fellow former Manitowoc Cranes employees—some
with nearly thirty years seniority—who are having to start once again at the
bottom. I also am working with former employees of Algoma Hardwood, a company
that was recently bought out and taken from the town of its birth. One of my
new co-workers had thirty-five years invested there, another had twenty-nine. We
are now a bunch of new hires in our forties and fifties, with no vacation time
or any of the other perks involved with being a longtime employee.
This is the sad reality facing many blue collar workers in
small and medium-sized towns in America. I knew people at Manitowoc Cranes who
had been through a factory closing before when Mirro moved to Mexico. Those
people were the first ones to leave and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t
just see it through to the end. That’s because I had no idea what a
soul-crushing experience it could be. As one of the last employees at Manitowoc
Cranes, I wandered through an increasingly deserted shop filled with the ghosts
of former friends, coworkers, union brothers and sisters. I saw the equipment
that had been used by generations of workers get packed up and shipped off to
people who wouldn’t even know what to do with it. I saw a hundred years of a
town’s history torn apart by people who would never deign step foot in our
insignificant town, people who never see the workers who make their profits as
anything more than numbers on a spreadsheet.
So while I am not a Trump supporter, I can understand why
some people chose to vote for him. They forgive Donald Trump the outrageous
things he says in the same way Hillary Clinton supporters forgive her the
outrageous things she has done. Democrats have forgiven her vote for the Iraq
War, have utterly ignored her part in the destruction of Libya. They have
forgotten her anti-gay marriage stance, and they are similarly forgetful of her
aggressive support of imprisoning black males. Trump supporters forgave his
outrageous statements and even his actions because people always vote with a
degree of unfounded optimism in their hearts or else they would simply stay
home. That, by the way, is still the majority of Americans: those who are
hopeless to the point where they did not vote at all.
That is what we are continuously being told to do, isn’t it?
To vote for an imperfect candidate rather than support an ideal one? If you are
urged election after election to vote for the lesser of two evils, you end up
tolerating a whole lot of evil in your chosen candidate. If the game voters are
taught to play is more about hatred than compassion, then people are going to
be led by their baser motivations in their quest for self-interests. And the
self-interest of the blue-collar worker is to have a decent paying job with
decent benefits and some measure of security. All they are really asking for is
a way to take care of themselves and their families. All they really want is a
bit of peace of mind and a little recognition for their contributions to
society. Whatever other wants they have are manufactured ones, pumped into them
by the propaganda of a consumer society.
No other mainstream candidate was willing to speak to these
people. And before you start calling those who reached out in need racists, the
people I’m talking about have names like Chang and Jose, too. Whatever race
issues exist may overlap but are separate from the issue of lack of job
opportunities and security. If you really think it’s about fascist racists,
consider how well an avowed socialist did in the 2016 election. A broad swath
of the American population was looking for an outsider, they were kicking at
both sides of the box they were being shoved into.
That is because no mainstream candidate was willing to admit
a problem existed. They were burying the failures of NAFTA because they were
gearing up for the next trade agreement, TPP. They were working, not for the
American people, but for the international business interests who wanted to
work out trade agreements on their terms, without any input from the workers.
And here’s the reality: the deal was so bad for the common working stiff that
even Republican voters were willing to cast aside Republicans who were in some
way tied to such trade agreements.
The media, too, was a factor. It avoided dealing with the
issues of working people. Not since Roseanne have working class issues been
portrayed in any real fashion on television. The media has always been
manipulating the average worker but the propaganda has built to the point where
people are willing to rebel against it (even though such rebellion has been
co-opted on both sides of the political spectrum, the hatred of the status quo
is genuine).
I’m under no illusions Donald Trump is going to help the
working man—like I said, I did not vote for him. I’m just trying to explain his
appeal to those who don’t understand it. And if you want to cry out about how
deluded Trump supporters are, I’d invite you to take a critical look at
yourself in the mirror and see what delusions you may be harboring. The
resistance of the left seems to me at least as absurd as the resistance on the
right, both channeled into hatred against the other rather than seeing the need
to come together to take on the greatest threats to our country and our planet
today. Hatred and finger-pointing may feel like resistance, but I doubt it will
come to anything positive. As a matter of fact, allowing your emotions to
outpace your reason is the easiest way to allow yourselves to be manipulated by
those people willing to prey upon your emotions. And after all, isn’t that what
the Trump movement has been about?
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