Man have I been out of sorts.
Grumpy. Irritable. These stories of windmills in Muskegon and Texas and the solar panel thing in Boston...it's got my panties all in a twist. The promise of green jobs from the stim. I've been obsessed.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I'm just a guy hammering at a brick wall.
The wife and I made some new friends not too long ago.
They moved from some place out West and into an area in Muskegon near the center of town, in a home by the Hospital. Beautiful old home. Huge. Wonderful woodwork on the inside. Well restored. Crazy affordable. And every once in a while they wake to find somebody passed out on their lawn. Or see a drug deal going on right outside their home. Boarded up windows. Tarps on the rooftops or disintegrating shingles. A twitchy, older gentleman frequently knocks on their door at all hours to ask for a glass of water. My friend obliges and sits outside with him while he drinks it, listening to stories of living on the streets, and how his wife keeps wandering around town and "if she ever comes near your house, shoot her."
Yeah. They kinda moved into one of the most impoverished parts of town. There, you can easily buy a home for around $4000. A big one. That's Four Thousand.
27% of Muskegon proper was below the poverty level in 2007.
That's when the Economy was the least of most of America's worries.
I don't know what the poverty level is now. But I'm going to guess it's more. We're talking about the sort of economic destruction that leaves entire families broken, entire neighborhoods broken. Abuse. Addiction. Neglect. In a long drawn out cycle. And it's not new. In this town of about 60,000 people (40,000 in Muskegon proper), it's been like this for decades for large portions of the population.
Why am I harping on this again? Why do I harp on this over and over again?
Because when I say "unemployed" I feel like people hear or envision something radically different from what I'm talking about.
Like readers think I mean "temporarily set back" or "inconvenienced." The image of a man sitting at a dining room table with a cup of coffee circling job prospects in a newspaper...
Not the sort of "unemployed" where plastic bags and clothing are crammed into cracks between the window and the walls to keep the winter out. Or the type of unemployed where the parents have long since "checked out" to addictions and the children are left to fend for themselves amidst piles of filth on the floor and Child Protective Services is too overworked and underfunded to field any but the most unbelievably extreme cases of abuse and neglect...and they have been for...well...for as long as I've ever known.
There are homes with tarp rooftops and yellowed newspaper taped over cracks in window panes in the shadow of an old, brick built factory. Fenced yards and mean dogs. The wooden steps leading to the front door are rotted and iffy in the center, stick to the sides.
If you've been reading my diaries lately, you'll notice I've been on something of a warpath because of a few little irritating green manufacturing jobs leaving the area. A few hundred here, a few hundred there...and my fury is met with people almost shrugging, saying "there is no other way," and "be patient."
It seems as though people wonder what all the fuss is about.
And once again, we're given assurances that this is the best way. To think otherwise is unrealistic. Naive. They're going to read this diary and apologize for the situation, and suggest that the latest spate of offshoring is just the reality. The jobs will come later.
Prosperity for people is always best delivered indirectly.
But...I guess, this is why I'm so out of sorts about any of the jobs leaving. Even 200. Even 1. Each one means another family may not have to live in poverty. Each one leaving isn't "oh well" it's a tragedy.