In 2011, my papa was laid off from a Whirlpool manufacturing plant, the kind that had for so long made America great. In the wake of the financial crisis, the C-suite had decided to offshore operations to Mexico.
The plant they shuttered was a 1.2 million sq ft manufacturing plant, and overnight, 1,000 people lost their jobs. Many of whom had been working there for decades.
My papa was 57 years old when he got laid off. He had worked at that very same plant for over 30 years, and snap just like that, it was all gone.
When I was a little girl, from as far back as I could remember, my papa woke up at 3:30 am and drove the 40 minutes to the plant from the rural 1,200-person town every single day. And for 30 years, he worked what were often 10-12 hour shifts with no complaints.
I grew up a Navy brat, so I didn’t get to see my grandparents except for a few months during the summer, but I remember my papa exerting the last drop of his energy so he could spend time with us going to the creek, building us a tree house, riding horses, and playing cowboys and Indians.
Every evening, starting from when I was in grade school, my papa and I would sit in the living room and watch the History Channel, Animal Planet, and Bill O’Reilly and hee-haw together about what the Democrats were doing, as much as an eight-year-old can.
My papa and my nana had been together since they graduated high school; they got married at barely 18 and had my mom less than a year later and my aunt soon after that.
They had a small homestead, owned most of what they had outright, and they were poor, but poor doesn’t have to mean that much when you can work the land.
My nana worked as the local school’s secretary, and my papa had good benefits with his manufacturing job. They only ever went out to eat on special occasions. McDonald’s was a birthday-only type of affair. They had a one-acre garden, a few head of cattle, would can fruits and vegetables at the end of every summer, and freeze chopped okra, blueberries, meat from wild hogs and venison in an old chest freezer in the workshop.
Despite never having been on a plane and seldom ever having been outside of Arkansas, they managed to put both my mom and aunt through college and graduate school without requiring them to incur even a dime of debt. This was the 1990s.
Then at the age of 57, my papa and 1,000 of his coworkers were thrown away like a piece of trash after giving that company decades of their lives. And what were they told to do? What was their consolation prize?
Learn. To. Code.
My papa and nana were born in the 1950s in a place that was quite literally the Wild West just mere decades before their birth.
Growing up, neither of them had running water—they drew water from a well, washed up in a tin tub heated over a fire, and went to the restroom in an outhouse. They were both educated in a one-room schoolhouse and both came from families that relied on their farm’s livestock to feed themselves. People like my grandparents built this nation. They built this nation for their children.
But because the thing they sought to build wasn’t a stock portfolio or real estate portfolio, the preservation of their homes and communities was not something that Wall Street nor Washington saw as having enough value to be anything more than apathetic about blowing up.
What they had been building was a community. A community in which people went to every imaginable length to help out every single person they could—a place where international trade policy and CDOs were mere distant thoughts.
But as is they way the world works now, small towns in small empty states, a hundred years of community building or not, are just simply a sacrifice the powers that be are willing to make in exchange for a mere few more bips.
My papa was forced into retirement in 2011, and my nana stayed working at the school for the next decade. My papa though, wasn’t quite willing to throw in the towel. He tried increasing the size of his herd of brangus, but alas, cattle farming has been a cash-negative endeavor for several decades.
Like Whirlpool all the other manufacturing plants. There was no work to be found for the thousands of people combined plant workers that had been laid off in the wake of 2008. Every single way of making an honest living had up and gone with the wind to Mexico and East Asia.
There was nothing left but being a Gas station, Dollar General or Walmart cashier, and Walmart paid $7.25 an hour back then.
But you’d be hard pressed to even work at a gas station. There are only two gas stations immediately around that 1,200-person town; and one of them just went out of business, the other is owned by a Pakistani family.
As a consequence, the average household income in that town is now ~$30,000 a year. 90% of the children are on free and reduced lunch, most of the families that remain are on state assistance, and opioid and meth use has reached unprecedented rates.
And yet, “learn to code” they contemptuously sneer, all while gleefully kicking the door wide open to a swarm of cheap, barely-proficient immigrants, tanking the tech labor market behind everyone’s back.
My family, stretching back to the 1600s, has given their blood, sweat, and tears making this country what it is. Building it up from dirt. From nothing.
400 years of living in unimaginably hostile conditions. Braving the disease, deadly weather, tribal nations, treachery, and lawlessness that is inherent to an ungoverned, unsettled territory. This nation was built, brick by brick, by bravest, toughest, most resilient people on the face of the earth.
And yet, for the past 60 years, the academic sophists in the ivory towers, the pigs in Washington, and the good-for-nothing parasites of the banking class have not only seen it fit to spit on their names, their sacrifices, their community, their race, and their religion, but also spit on their legacies, their children, their grandchildren, and their rightful inheritance. There are not the words in the English language to describe the evil of the orchestrated treachery that the United States government and those so interested, have inflicted on the inheritors of this nation.
The blood that was spilled carving this nation out of the god-forsaken backwaters it was, was a real, material thing. Blood, like people, is a material thing. And nations are comprised of people. America is a people. Ideas can’t shed blood; only people can. Ideas can’t sacrifice; only people can.
To call America an “idea” alone is to forsake all of those who shed their real blood and lost their real lives to construct the very comfort and luxury required to sit back and even consider calling such a sacrifice an “idea.”
For the last six decades, every single legacy institution, academic institution, government institution, and NGO has spent the past decade calling the very people who built this nation various iterations of uniquely, inherently, ontologically evil, calling us racists, and rapists, and genociders, and slavers, and oppressors, and backwoods, and inbreds, and reprobates, and white trash—all the while not-so-secretly making contingency plans for what to do with those of us ultimately considered excess biomass.
The American people decided at the ballot box. It’s time to pay the piper.
Bring back manufacturing, slap tariffs on imports, close the borders, deport the illegals, fire every single spiteful government-funded mutant, and remove the dollar from its position as world reserve currency. Americans, especially those of us who consider ourselves “ethnically” Heritage American—do not care how much it’s going to cost us in the short term; we are willing to sacrifice if it means we don’t have to sit and watch what’s left of our rightful inheritance be burned to the ground.
We want those guilty to pay their due penance. We want heads to roll.
