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.
Easier said than done. In some items it’s close to impossible. In others one has to do a lot of work to find the non Chinese product. And even then it might still be a Chinese company. How many here knew a good chunk of the Italian clothing industry was taken over by the Chinese until the virus hit Italy?
Doc Martin’s once
Were made in
Britain,
Now it’s
China!
.
The Horror,
The Horror.
I suspect she didn't make it to 18.
Exactly right.
Our problem is not well described and discussed here.
Rather than blaming the manufacturers who left for China, the blame belongs at the feet of the liberal voters and the politicians who made it so difficult for manufacturers that they fled to China to escape the tree huggers, anti-coal, anti....everything.
At the same time, every CEO of a company with stockholders owed/owes the stockholders the duty to make the maximum profit possible within the law.
That combination forced companies to move.
True certain companies were blessed with a genius who could buck the trend. One of the most obvious would be the “My Pillow” guy, whose ads irritate the hell out of me but he is to be admired nevertheless.
So bottom line: We did it to ourselves. CEO’s are not the only people to blame.
President Trump has done a fantastic job of removing some of the obstacles to manufacturing in the US, but he still has a lot of work ahead and everyone here should support him in that effort.
No, our corporate leaders did this to us.
Political leaders. Corporate leaders. China.
How about the American consumer who won't buy American if it's a little more expensive and forces the businesses offshore if they want to stay viable?
I guess it's human nature but I'm still surprised at how many people can identify all sorts of villains but refuse to look in the mirror.
Maybe Trump's cartel war can eventually "Make Mexico Great" and provide these voters a less geopolitically risky alternative - but it will take time.
No. Not never. But its important to consider the percentage of the population that indulges in debasement and the reason. Surely you understand that. Perhaps you don’t.
Allegory. I suspect the young girl was emblematic of a young America. This is a parable (not a story). The democrat ending is, she has an abortion or two then several kids by different John's and lives a life of welfare.
Right. I got all my serious thinkin' done earlier this a.m.
lol
What can a 16 year old Asperger's spectrum waif tell you about climate? It's a hook.
Some how, some way, sometime ago, we as a culture made the decision that hard dirty work by hard dirty men was immoral.
Unless you wrote code you were being exploited and also killing the planet.
In an educated, high class, woke society there simply was no place for dirt under the fingernails.
Best to export those nasty tasks to the untermensch of the 3rd world where we don't have to smell them.
Well, you know what they say about Chinese titty bars.
You visit one...an hour later, you want to visit another one.
Thanks. I was trying to figure that out.
And, after a fight with her boss, who ran the joint and wanted to act as her pimp, she agreed to go.
Then, in the process of this, she could have told him her story about how she ended up in a strip joint and hooked on crank. And who her family were and what their troubles were.
Stories, even parables and allegories, have more resonance when they have a human face.
And there are hundreds of thousand of young girls like this one who really are struggling to escape youthful addiction and poverty with some semblance of their lives and sanity...if just one decent young man happened to stop in for a drink at a "titty bar."
Thank you.
MAMA
Make America Manufacture Again!
Good meme, Nully.
‘Face
Nicely done
The heart break of globalism. This is the cost of letting coastal elites make all the decisions of what’s important for America
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