The Great American Migrating Labor Camp

A transient nation? Or a nation of transients?

Recently, I’ve been dabbling in the realm of municipal politics. It’s not something I ever really thought I would do, or was all that serious about, even though, ever since 2016, I’ve had my suspicions that they are far more important than we often realize.

The thing is, you probably have complaints about your town. Everyone does. Things could be managed better. Funds could be allocated more efficiently. The people who often make decisions in terms of zoning and planning are usually uneducated on the topic and unwittingly bumbled into the position through personal connections, or is some mid-wit striver looking for a bit of undeserved ego-stoking on their way to a spot on the city council. The great thing about municipal politics is that, more often than not, when the worst people in your town that hold positions of power? Well, they do, y’know, kinda live in your town. And they have names, addresses, and more importantly, enemies. You don’t have to run for mayor to route the current dipshit turning your town into Berkley 2.0 out of office yourself, because, lucky for you, there’s probably already a handful of fellow concerned citizens gunning for the big man’s seat.

To me, it just always seemed rather counter-intuitive to complain about the direction our communities head, yet very few people seem willing to actually nut up and do anything about it, even though the tools of municipal government are more attainable than most of the uninitiated would believe.

Now, I understand this isn’t a one-size fits all affair. If you live in a small-to-medium sized suburb, your competition is going to be a lot less stiff than if you were in large city, not to mention the bigger the city, the more layers of of increasingly esoteric power you have to navigate. Even in a middling size city like a Spokane, Washington or an Abiline, Texas, you’ll probably want to ingratiate yourself with either the local Republicans or Democrats just to get anywhere. It’s a Faustian bargain that isn’t strictly necessary, but it’ll make your life a lot easier.

Here, you’ll see a picture of Spokane that makes it look like somewhere that normal people could live.

I also understand that not everyone has the resources to run a campaign. Depending on the size of your city, money may not be the biggest barrier to entry; people have run municipal campaigns on shoe-string budgets that wouldn’t even cover a year-long lease in the average apartment of wherever they live. But time? That’s another story. You can fundraiser for cash, but you aren’t going to collect a few extra hours of the day out of anyone. That’s to say nothing of the sheer tenacity to go through with it and mental bandwidth to take the responsibilities of office onto your plate.

What I’m trying to say is that, even if you don’t want to run for local office, you can do more to influence municipal politics than is readily apparent. Many of these city employees operate in obscurity. The best of them are eager for more community input and involvement so they can perform their job better, and they’ll happily sit down and talk with you if you give them some time. The worst of them need that public apathy to operate, and the minute the community actually begins to take active interest in what they’re doing, they usually don’t last long.

Many of the individuals I’ve been working with were also uninterested, apathetic, and uninformed about municipal politics two or three years ago. Then, one day, for no reason at all filth like this started showing up in elementary school libraries.

Well, well, well… I wonder why this happened? Was it because of the literal, avowed communist on the school board? Could it be the notorious sex pest ex-cop on the school board that openly admitted to having seen more, er… cheese pizza than anyone ever should - as part of the job, of course. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the school board member who was also on the county ‘human rights’ council that helped organize the town’s pride festival.

Truly, it was a mystery as to where these books about suckin’ and fuckin’ came from. I suppose they kind of materialized of their own accord, and right in the elementary school library! Wonders never cease.

Now, many newcomers to my town are refugees from Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles, who moved here specifically to get away from this kind of dreck and send their children to schools where they cuould hopefully, maybe just be left alone to learn their ABC’s and basic math without also being told about Billy’s two daddies. And a lot of them spent a lot of money to relocate here. So, how happy do you think they were to find out that this supposedly ruby red conservative bastion of family values was also lending out copies of Bye Bye Gender Binary?

Mm… well, they weren’t too happy.

The school board was pretty much cleaned out - not even by locals, but mostly through the grass roots efforts of West Coast transplants who were more interested in keeping the community safe for children than most natives. Many local boomer types - self-professed conservatives, too - were actually against these people and their attempts to clean up the school board, because, uh, keeping books about drag queens out of the school libraries is, like, censorship, man. Or something.

Why drag queens, of all things, is the hill that these people want to die on, I’ll never understand.

Now, I live in a town of less than half a 100,000. There’s a lot of movers and shakers, new money and old money, local heroes and reviled villains, but, the thing is, with a town as centralized as this one, you’re quite liable to run into these people if you know where to look for them.

Just the other day, I met a friend for wine on the main drag through town, and who should walk in but City Councilman #3. I won’t name names, for his sake and mine, but, suffice to say, this guy is the worst kind of NIMBY type who makes building anything in town a royal pain in the ass.

Y’see, he moved up to this beautiful community a total of, er… three years ago, and he came out here to get away from the urban sprawl of Los Angeles - how dare anyone else have the audacity to also want to move where he decided to get away! We can’t be building new homes. He didn’t move here to see new homes. We especially can’t be building new, cheaper homes, either, oh, no, no, no. Forget the fact eighty percent of the county can’t afford the average home price at the median income, so building smaller, cheaper homes is really the only alternative to solving the county’s mounting housing crisis - building those homes might attract riff-raff in the community! The word alone… so filthy. Poor Eliza just fainted from the vapors, thinking about a… why, I myself can barely bring myself to say the word, but middle-class family living down the street from us!

“By God, send for the doctor! She just saw someone with an income of less than four hundred thousand a year!”

No - we simply shan’t be building anything more in this town! We won’t hear any more of this absurd talk… Well, unless it’s a new high-rise condo in the middle of down-town with units that start at $750,000. I suppose I could swing for that.

Tee hee!

In all seriousness, it’s all just typical boomer pulling up the ladder behind you bullshit; all for me, none for thee, go fuck yourself. It’s a mindset that’s actively sucking the life out of this town. The age pyramid is skewing older and older with every passing year as more and more young locals are forced to relocate due to rising housing costs, young transplants that could add to the work force are also priced out, and more retired boomers move in and send the price of everything into the stratosphere. The worst part is, the more working-age people move out, the more businesses have trouble finding employees. The more businesses have hiring issues, the more many of them relocate. The more businesses relocate, the more hollowed out this once vibrant town will be.

It’s a vicious cycle that feeds on itself, and, even though the cause is quite apparent, the old farts that have an iron-grip on city politics refuse to acknowledge that anything’s wrong. I mean, hey - look at the graph, buddy. The numbers speak for themselves. The graph is going up. That’s all that matters, right? So long as the red line goes up, everything’s fine!

In all seriousness, the group I’ve thrown my lot in with is less about rooting out the idiots on the school board that want to make The Anti-Racist Baby standard reading material for kindergartners -

I’m not even joking - and more of a broad coalition seeking to find better methods of urban planning, zoning, and home-building to alleviate the crisis and make sure that good, hard-working people who want to live here can, rather than let this whole fucking county be hollowed out and turned into a glorified retirement home for wealthy boomer jack-offs. There’s a lot of overlap between the two groups, but, at the same time, I don’t have kids, and while I wish them well and support them however I can, that’s not my fight.

Last night, we had an economist from the state’s labor bureau come speak to our group. He gave a good presentation with a lot of useful information that, quite frankly, just confirmed everything I already know from my own experience in the home-building industry, but it’s always nice to be validated.

Ultimately, to keep it succinct, the discussion of, How do we keep the state economically robust? How do we attract businesses? How do we attract young, ambitious people who want to work and build prosperity, even as local politicians do everything they can to keep it from happening? This guy’s answer?

Well… you can’t. At least, not in perpetuity. There are good times. There are bad times. The fortunes of towns, cities, counties, even states, they wax and they wane. You come when they’re good. You leave when they’re bad. It’s the nature of things in America.

He spoke to the fact that America is a mobile country. Basically, his point was that, compared to many other developed nations, Americans move around a lot. We always have, and we always will. Part of that comes with having a surfeit of land and the opportunity to make something of it. Part of it is that Americans are - or maybe were - an industrious people. People in this country have always gravitated to where the opportunity is.

The economic engine of this country used to run from Detroit to Philadelphia, all along today what’s called the Rust Belt. So people moved there. Then, it gravitated to California, so people moved there, and the Rust Belt gradually decayed into the miserable husk riddled with opioid addicts and grinding poverty that we see today. Now, it seems that California’s economic dominance is beginning to wane, and the center of gravity in the country is shifting to the South.

Just last month, it was announced that Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, South and North Carolina, and Texas were now contributing more to the national GDP than all of the Northeastern states combined. Florida is the nation’s fastest growing state, while Georgia and Texas are not far behind. More movies and television programs are filmed and produced in Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida than in Los Angeles. Not combined - separately. Houston is the energy capital of the world, and boasts the largest medical district in the country, and the second largest in internationally behind Beijing, which serves as the premier medical research center not nationally, but globally. Charlotte, North Carolina, is the second largest banking hub in the country behind New York, and is on pace to eclipse it as major banks look at vacating the Big Apple. New York still has the most Fortune 500 companies operating out of it than any other state, but that stranglehold is growing weaker by the year. The runner-ups? Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta.

“Not bad for a couple of Southern boys with a dream, eh, Bobby?”

My own father will speak to this phenomenon, as he lived part of childhood in California and the latter half of it in the Houston area of South Texas as his father’s job in the oil industry took him from coast to coast. He’ll tell you that, in both places, almost no one was actually from either Los Angeles or Houston - they were all glorified economic migrants that had moved along with the shifting currents of economic caprice.

I look around at the men I’ve been meeting with at this discussions, and they, too, are like me - transplants. Many of my friends here are. Not to say I know no native-born locals, but the vast majority of my social circle are from California, Washington, Oregon, and, strangely enough, Minnesota. Some have been here for quite a while, but they’re all, in some form or another, immigrants. We only half-jokingly call ourselves exiles.

Some moved due here to economic reasons at home, which made finding gainful employment in their field difficult as foreign labor depressed wages and made housing prohibitively expensive. Many moved because their children were being racially harassed for being white as their lily-white suburban schools were flooded with inner-city minorities, or the curriculum featured too much Rainbow Coalition indoctrination.

One recent acquisition to our social circle told me he’d wanted to flee Seattle for years, but just it wasn’t economically feasible. Then, the Washington state legislature passed the insidious Senate Bill 5599, which quite literally allows the state to seize your child without recourse if a teacher, a neighbor, or what have you suspects the child is “trans”, and you’re preventing them from getting “gender-affirming care”. This guy quite literally packed up and left the next day. He was so desperate to bail that he’s still trying to sell his house in the Seattle area. The Minnesotans? Well, they’re overwhelmingly from Minneapolis, and, uh…

I don’t really need to elaborate, do I?

And me? Well, I just couldn’t take the Texas heat. You ever been there in the summer time? One hundred and twelve degrees and two hundred percent humidity, ten months out the year… yeah. I got tired of it. I just needed a change of scenery, y’know?

But, also -

The Lone Star State ain’t what it used to be, either. No line going up on a graph or Fortune 500 company relocating to Houston’s gonna fix these problems.

This all being said, this state economist is right - Americans have always been a mobile people. We tend to follow the money. Mice go where the cheddar is, I get that. But, I have to ask - is that trait not part of what may have gotten us into this situation to begin with? Being rootless, transient vagabonds, drifting along on economic currents, shifting from one city to the next, leaving behind our friends, our families, our roots, our history behind, searching for better jobs, better homes, better schools, as the places we grew up in are strip-mined for everything their worth by companies with no loyalty to anything but their own profit margins - is that not part of what brought us to this?

Is America a transient nation, as this gentleman said? Or are we a nation of transients? Do we live in cities? Or do we live in temporary, pop-up work camps? Do we live in homes, or do we live in investment properties? Do we have neighbors, or co-workers? Wives, or cohabitation economic partners?

I like to say America is an open-air tax plantation. I couch it as a joke when I do, but I’m only disguising a sad fact with a thin veneer of humor. I’m not the first to make this assessment, hardly. I’ve also heard it been said that America is less of a functioning country than it is a coast-to-coast shopping mall. Think about everything I just described - you’ll probably find that statement apropos, as well.

If we treated our towns like actual towns, our communities like communities, our homes like homes, then would we perhaps not be so eager to discard them for a cheap, easy alternative as soon as it becomes convenient? If those words meant anything to most Americans - which I suspect they don’t - would we have allowed our country to fall apart the way we have?

This may be a controversial take, but a country often gets the leaders it deserves, whether the population realizes it or not. If you have a transient society, built on the back of migrating workers with no real ties to anything but a vague idea of a country that might exist, chasing the next economic high - a country that fundamentally does not take itself serious as a cohesive civilization and more like just another worthless, temporary job staffed by faceless, nameless, anonymous strangers…

Who else are you going to get leading your country?¹

Either way, once we wrapped up the meeting, we went downstairs for cigars and drinks, as we often do, and to continue the discussion in a much less informal manner. One of the men in attendance - someone running for city council - was actually quite displeased with the suggestion that, when this town becomes economically undesirable, it be abandoned to its fate, like Gary, Indiana, or Detroit. He wasn’t the only one.

He said that he wants his children to be baptized in the same church he was. He’s one of the few resident natives I know that was born in town - he intends to die there, as well, and he wants his children to inherit his property, and their children after that, so on and so forth. It’s an honorable aspiration. Many of the transplants from the west coast were in agreement. The words, “We’ve been running for too long,” were spoken many times. The thing about running is that, sure, it works in the short term, but you end up exhausting the amount of places you can run. There’s only so many red states left. Most are becoming more purple by the day. Looking at my own state, and the one I left behind, I can also safely say that having conservative politicians in seats of power means very little.

These people were chased out of their homes in states that they were born and raised in - now that they’ve settled here, put down roots, and worked hard to raise a community, they don’t intend to leave, either.

And me?

Well, I’m like that cool, edgy guy in the cliche action movie, the loose-cannon, the devil who may care, the one who plays by his own rules, in that scene where all the main characters are standing around a table, plotting their final attack against overwhelming odds and an overpowered enemy. Everyone says, one by one, “I’m in.” And then there’s me, sitting at the very back, half-swathed in shadow with a smoldering smoke in my hand.

“You’re all crazy. This is a suicide mission. You’re all gonna die.”

Silence.

“Heh.” I give a coarse, snide chuckle, wisps of smoke unfurling from my mouth. “What the hell. I’m in.”

That’s just a fun way of saying, I’ve really got nothing better to do, so, sure. What the hell.

Also my career background is very valuable to the discussion and I’m able to explain a lot of things about construction, the industry, city planning and municipal red tape that they find quite informing and helpful, but that’s neither here nor there.

Also, if there’s anything I can do to make this place… real, in a way, as opposed to some temporary labor camp that is experiencing a brief surge of prosperity, only to be doomed to stagnation and decay once the good times slow, I’d like that. I’m not a big fan of running, myself. And I really don’t want to go back to Texas and face the blistering summer heat, either.

So, if you feel similarly, I encourage you to get involved in local politics. It doesn’t have to be through city government. Your local Parks and Rec services are always looking for volunteers. There’s a church that would love to have you help in their community outreach programs, if you don’t already have one. Hell, go join the local adult sports league. Make friends. Put down roots. You’ll be surprised how much change you’ll begin to see in not a lot of time.

And now, I’ll leave you with two questions:

Do you want to live in a serious country? Or do you want to live in a shopping mall?

And if so, consider this:

If not you, who? If not now, when?²

1. And, no, I’m not saying Ol’ Joe was elected, fairly or otherwise. I know he wasn’t. My point still stands - if we took ourselves seriously, he would have never even come within groping distance of any political office, let alone the presidency.

2. This quote is attributed to a variety of people, ranging from Melania Trump to Ronald Reagan and a bunch of hucksters and grifters of the economic variety, but, in actuality, it can be traced back to the Jewish scholar Hillel the Elder.