Posted on 04/04/2020 6:15:25 AM PDT by Brookhaven
From November 2003 through July 2005, I worked in the prepaid cell phone and phone card industry.
Most of my work was in BFE meth towns and urban ghettoes.
I learned things about the poor in America you won’t want to believe…
But this story needs to be told.
The situation was horrible in 2005.
The opioid crisis was already in full swing in rural Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio.
Back then, small towns in Western Kentucky had nothing going on.
“Commerce” amounted to a Super 8 motel, a few gas stations, and fast food.
If you were in one of the better towns, you might have had the option to feast at Applebee’s.
The social situation matched the commerce—broke and destitute.
Hell, Western Kentucky wasn’t even “rich” enough for meth…
Everybody was on crank, which is basically the same thing, but with lower quality and produced by someone with fewer teeth.
One day, after delivering phones all over Western Kentucky, I decided to have a drink at a titty bar in Christian County (lol).
Keep in mind that Western Kentucky is basically a live episode of “People of Walmart.” In other words, not exactly the place to find beautiful women brimming with the energy of life.
But as soon as I entered that titty bar, this lithe angel—wearing a white lacey thing—floated over to my table like a moth drawn to flame.
She sat in my lap and soaked up my attention as if it were the only resource left on this Earth.
She was by far the most attractive woman I’d seen in weeks of working Western Kentucky.
Young, beautiful, giving me lots of energy—what the hell was she doing in such a desolate, hopeless place?
After half an hour of conversation, she asked to leave the bar with me!
Well, this set off every internal alarm I’ve got.
The situation went from pleasant-but-strange to “what the hell is going on here?”
I was 23 years old at the time—and not exactly the poster child for self-restraint or giving a f*ck.
But I knew something wasn’t right.
I grabbed the girl’s hand and pulled it close to inspect it.
Her skin was perfect. She was young.
Was this a sting?
I began to suspect this girl wasn’t 18. And what did she want?
She started begging me to leave with her.
I told her there was no way in hell that was gonna happen, and in fact, I had to GTFO because things seemed shady.
That’s when she told me:
“I’m only 15.”
*I blink twice in a moment of stunned silence*
“Please, I’ll leave with you right now and we can go get some crank.”
And there it was.
She was 15. Stripping. And addicted to drugs made by people with 2-digit IQs who never attended a high school chemistry class.
Equipped with this new perspective, I started feeling worse and worse about the work I was doing.
No wonder everybody looks like People of Walmart.
No wonder there’s no commerce.
No wonder there’s no energy.
Small town America was rotting from the inside-out.
When people talk about the opioid crisis now, all I can think is—
It was REALLY F’N BAD 15 years ago.
It’s got to be HELL now.
What happened? Where do we go from here?
Well, now we have fentanyl.
Instead of becoming hopelessly addicted and having their lives slip away slowly, addicts can now enjoy death’s sweet embrace at any moment thanks to a tainted supply.
Do you know where fentanyl comes from?
China.
And now we also have the coronavirus (COVID-19), which has got me thinking about China’s bullsh*t:
Opioids Fentanyl Synthetic viruses All trash.
But one thing is far worse, IMO:
Chinese manufacturing Have you ever thought about this?
For most of her life, America has been a rural nation.
When transportation was worse, America’s population was even more spread out than it is now.
Does that make any damn sense?
Many factors play a role here, obviously, but the most important one—and the one that drove and sustained American cities from 1865 through 1960—was manufacturing.
America is where sh*t got made (at least version 1.0).
When that started to change, America changed with it.
As America became more of a regulatory state, pressure to keep prices down (while remaining compliant) became a primary animating force for manufacturing companies.
And as a result, low-skilled labor got outsourced to countries where abuse and exploitation were tolerated.
From the 1970s through the present, China has been more than happy to absorb the manufacturing that floated every small American town through the first half of the 20th century.
Worker abuse? Human rights?
Meh.
China got what it wanted—a foothold for economic growth.
With the western world relying on China for manufacturing, China had an economic insurance policy that would cause short-term chaos for any nation that wished to untether itself from them.
It’s fair to blame American companies for moving manufacturing to China.
I’m more likely to blame the regulatory climate, but I concede that worldwide imbalances in cost of living will inevitably shift manufacturing centers to wherever is cheapest.
But I look at this whole situation, and I think about:
the way small American towns worked when manufacturing happened here that 15yo girl, stripping and addicted to crank the destitute feeling of small-town America in the 21st century God damn.
In a way, we are all complicit.
We want nice stuff at low prices.
We want to feel like we operate in a humane, high-brow way.
But in reality, we’ve just moved the really bad “sins” to places where we don’t have to feel like we’re accountable (like China).
And we are blind.
We mortgaged America’s small towns and her children to achieve these goals.
I cannot look at COVID-19 or iPhones or opioids or anything without thinking about China and how America has hitched her wagon to this rotten death spiral.
In hindsight, what was that 15yo girl supposed to do?
In 2020, there’s no social anything in Bumfuck, America.
There are few factories where men—her potential suitors—could have stable jobs.
There’s no energy moving into those communities; nothing new is on the horizon.
We cannot continue down this path.
It’s time to move manufacturing back to America.
All of it.
It’s immoral to do business the way we have, especially since it’s all in the name of cheaper goods and more socially-acceptable PR.
But nobody talks about the American human cost.
We have paid enough.
Although we can get stuffed animals for $0.86 apiece and iPhones for $1000, we haven’t done a full accounting of the cost of shifting manufacturing to China.
What’s the cost of dissolving America’s network of small towns, leaving only urban centers?
What about the people?
To me, this is a lot like the mental vs. physical balance we all must strive for to be effective players in life.
America has focused on one thing—the physical, in this case—at the expense of the mental.
We are out of balance.
And we have leaned on China to get here.
Excellent point.
Yeah. Good story, but you were supposed to get back to the girl.
Like, ten years later you happened thru the same town and suddenly had an abcessed tooth, and accidentally found her working as a dental assistant, yes, a dental assistant, with a picture of a nice looking young gentleman, a young black gentleman actually, and two kids, having been rescued from her circumstances by certain members of her extended family, who helped her get rehabbed, GED’d, and into the local community college and thence to work.
Too contrived and sappy like a Lifetime movie? Yes, of course, but still... maybe?
Alternatively, one happened thru the same unfortunate little town and stopped at a seedy looking little C-Store to buy some gas and a coke... the guy behind the counter looked kinda recognizable but you just couldn’t place him... just as one was about to walk thru the door to go back out to one’s car... oh yeah... The bouncer from the bar.
So one turned back inside to ask a few questions of the former bouncer between other customers... And the discerning reader is left to figure it out, without one actually having to come out and say what happened when.
Nice article, though. It does have truth in it.
That's very good.
This is an excellent post..Note that the urban centers are where this virus is the worst...add to that the percentage of crime, abortions, lousy educational systems and you have reality staring you in the face. It is time to move many industries out of the population centers and into the flyover counties. It is time to decentralize government bureaucracies and share the wealth of government jobs in small communities. It is past time to restore the dignity and civil lifestyle of Main Street America. Maybe this virus will wake some people up.
What about the free traitors at Free Republic, who laughed at us “Buy American” types for paying a little more for Made in USA? I wonder how that $.10 they saved on paint brushes is working out for them now.
Ha! I wondered if he was from that Brookhaven, too.
Sorry but I don't speak acronym. Does that stand for Good Morning To America?
The only part he left out was the synthetics they put in our food.
As a very young Navy man I saw outsourcing coming in 1964. To be more specific, when that pillar of corruption, LBJ, signed into law the 1964 civil rights act.
In my mind it was a foregone conclusion what company’s were going to do.
Yes and great minds think alike.
However, Americans of ages past endured more hardship without turning to drugs and moral degradation, and it is the spiritual decline of the country (including even in the evangelical churches) that is behind its choices to go liberal, immoral, and unwise in economics.
Concerning the latter, China was not simply happy to satisfy America's love for low prices at any cost, but I believe it was a calculated move on their part to vastly diminish the industrial might that was integral in enabling America to win 2 world wars.
And why drag “Christian” into it?
The county is named for Colonel William Christian, a native of Augusta County, Virginia, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War. He settled near Louisville, Kentucky in 1785, and was killed by Native Americans in southern Indiana in 1786.
“...was killed by Native Americans in southern Indiana in 1786.”
Your wisdom is infinite.
It happened after World War I also. Lots of people were gassed.
Learn something new every day. Ok!
Somebody just missed being rolled.
The free traitors knew full well what they were doing because the rest of us told them so but as the recipients of Chinas barbarian management they dgaf. They deserve to be beaten and hung from lampposts like any other traitor.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.