Monica Potts' beautiful In the Land of Self-Defeat in today's New York Times (October 6, 2019) accurately portrays the fragile realities of community in a very small place: Clinton, Arkansas. Self-defeated is a way of describing the lives and attitudes of many people there: just about anything a governmental body can do is a sad waste of money. Potts describes a fight over library financing and the salary of a librarian (that would have paid her $25 per hour or about $42,000 per year) as a step too far for the residents, whose median household income is often not more than $25,000. Self-defeated is about much more than finances, but about an entire attitude and expectation of individual lives and community life that the word describes.
Particularly telling is one resident's dismissal of the value of the librarian's degree or the work of the library. “Call me narrow-minded but I’ve never understood why a librarian needs a four-year degree,” someone wrote. “We were taught Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough.” That remark is not about Dewey. It is a willful dismissal of what the library there does: provide a portal to so much of the world beyond Clinton for those who cannot afford it or even imagine it. The evocation of Dewey itself is a telling dismissal: a nineteenth century system of relative shelf location is taken as the be-all and end-all of what can be known --not just a library, but what a library can point to.
In Potts' telling, the politics and mind-set of scarcity defines Van Buren County, Arkansas, and "people didn’t want to pay for something they didn’t think they would use." The Chair of the library board points to a conversation, "They’d say, ‘So-and-so has a big farm and they may not even use the library,’” (The Chair pointed out that he doesn't have children and never uses the public school.) Social discourse becomes even more impoverished than community finances. In Potts' words:
A considerable part of rural America is shrinking, and, for some, this means it’s time to go into retreat. Rather than pitching in to maintain what they have, people are willing to go it alone, to devote all their resources to their own homes and their own families. . . . They believe every tax dollar spent now is wasteful and foolish and they will have to pay for it later. It is as if there will be a nationwide scramble to cover the shortfall just as there was here with the library.
I was left thinking, "what about the children? What about the young people? Is there any hope here for the future? How is the next generation to live?
One of the premises of all education is that somehow things might become better, smarter, wiser, more effective, from theory to very practical results. When education is seen as strictly a private good, that benefits only the person enrolled, and strictly as job training, to do work that is done right now, then any sense of hope for betterment has vanished. And a school or university becomes simply a credential mill, properly certifying new workers to do what is done now. This is wildly dissonant with ideas about innovation (disruptive or incremental) or any kind of increased efficiencies or synergies. "Self-defeated" portrays those withdraw, pull back, turn aside from any hope that things could be better than they are in any way whatsoever.
Potts' writing haunts me (I look forward to her book) because I know these people, and grew up with them in Bridgeport, Michigan. Bridgeport is or was probably a step above Clinton, Arkansas, but only a small one. In the 1950s and 1960s the attitude there was one-dimensional: work in the automobile plants, get 30-and-out, and retire early. Maybe the UAW can help, maybe not. In retrospect many people regard those times as better than they were; in reality the economy there was heavily boom/bust and the busts were not pretty. (See Daniel Clark's Disruption in Detroit, Univ of Illinois Press, 2018) In this decade Bridgeport is a shadow of its former self (which wasn't much to begin with), and the same mindset of withdrawal and going-it-alone is pervasive throughout the township. Saginaw County's population has declined dramatically since 1980 from 228,000 to 190,000 (while the USA grew from 226 million to 327 million). The neighboring school district went bankrupt, was taken over by the state, and dissolved; the local school district was in similar difficulty but seems to have become more stable in the past few years.
Potts quotes a resident of Clinton, Arkansas, "“If you want to make $25 an hour, please go to a city that can afford it." Many from Clinton took her advice and left; many from Bridgeport, Michigan have taken similar advice, as did I. The potential for a life at anything more than just above the poverty line are very limited in both places. More than that statistical, financial poverty line is the poverty of spirit, a refusal to see what could be possible, a reluctance to band together to fight for what could be better, and a real willingness to disparage any achievement elsewhere as a sad waste of money and time.
I try to balance Potts' article with the blogs by James and Deborah Fallows that look at places in America that are re-inventing themselves, Our Towns. I try to square the demoralized, self-defeated residents of many rural corners with the attractive idea that needs further research, that some young professionals are intentionally moving away from expensive urban centers to places where life is both more affordable and more relaxed. Potts article warns: those places are not just everywhere or anywhere. For a community to re-invent itself, to fight against the self-defeatism that reigns in Clinton, Arkansas, or Bridgeport, Michigan, such a community needs a core of dedicated people, both leaders and followers, who see what an area could be, what it could offer, how it could be better --in short, a set of people who can hope and then get to work. In too many rural communities, those people simply have left, frustrated with the poverty of mind, imagination and spirit.
Potts does not mention a curious fact about Clinton, Arkansas: it has seen another, useful government intervention (with private assistance). A 1982 flood of the Archery Fork of the Upper Little Red River severely damaged the town and a subsequent channelization project sought to prevent another one. In 2012 the Nature Conservancy and the state Game and Fish Commission supported a cantilevered stream bed, a trail, and habitat restoration. I can't imagine that anyone in Clinton would be in favor of another 1982 flood (but I can imagine, "That project. What a sad waste of government money.") I can definitely imagine a familiar dismissal of the later re-engineering to provide better habitat, so that flood control would divide the community less sharply, even though I imagine few would want the old channel back. It must be an improvement, but will be dismissed as a waste. If my suspicions are correct, this is a prime example of how a community can defeat itself: a refusal to hope, a willing refusal to work together. No wonder anyone who can gets out. How poorly these people are served by the very ideology and individuals they select to preside over their local, state, and national communities.
In self-defeat is written the story of our national decline. How then is the next generation to live?