It is so true, and it is so misunderstood. One of the people commenting on her blog post said, essentially, that it is dangerous to romanticize about a “golden age,” that all generations struggle, and that life is hard.
Yes, those things are all true. But they are largely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
There is a very large middle ground between a “golden age” and an “existential struggle.” The time and place about which we are both writing (the late 1970s through the present, in the Rust Belt) was neither. But it was undoubtedly a time of extreme transition. It was a great economic unraveling, and we are collectively and individually still trying to figure out how to navigate through it, survive it, and ultimately build something better out of it.
History is cyclical. Regardless of how enamored Americans, in general, may be with the idea, it is not linear. It is neither a long, slow march toward utopia nor toward oblivion. When I look at history, I see times of relative (and it’s all relative, this side of paradise) peace, prosperity, and stability, and other times of relative strife, economic upheaval, uncertainty, and instability. We really did move from one of those times to the other, beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the present.
The point that is easy to miss when uttering phrases like “life is hard for every generation” is that none of this discussion about the Rust Belt—where it’s been, where it is going—has anything to do with a golden age. But it has everything to do with the fact that this time of transition was an era (like all eras) that meant a lot (good and bad) to the people that lived through it. It helped make them who they are today, and it helped make where they live what it is today.
For those who were kids at the time the great unraveling began (people like me, and people like Della), it is partially about the narrative that we were socialized to believe in at a very young age, and how that narrative went up in a puff of smoke. In 1977, I could smell rubber in the air, and many of my family members and friends’ parents worked in rubber factories. In 1982, the last passenger tire was built in Akron. By 1984, 90 percent of those jobs were gone, many of those people had moved out of town, and the whole thing was already a fading memory.
Just as when a person dies, many people reacted with a mixture of silence, embarrassment, and denial. As a kid, especially, you construct your identity based upon the place in which you live. The whole identity that I had built, even as a small child, was of a proud Akronite: This is the RUBBER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD; this is where we make lots and lots of Useful Things for people all over the world; this is where Real Americans Do Real Work; this is where people from Europe, the South, and Appalachia come to make a Better Life for themselves …
Well, that all got yanked away. I couldn’t believe any of those things anymore, because they were no longer true, and I knew it. I could see it with my own two eyes. Maybe some of them were never true to begin with, but kids can’t live a lie the way that adults can. When the mythology of your hometown no longer stands up to scrutiny, it can be jarring and disorienting. It can even be heartbreaking.
We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.
—TYLER DURDEN, Fight Club
I’m fond of the above quote. I was even fonder of it when I was twenty-eight years old. Time, and the realization that life is short, and that you ultimately have to participate and do something with it besides analyze it as an outside observer, has lessened its power considerably. It remains the quintessential Generation X quote, from the quintessential Generation X movie. It certainly fits in quite well with all of this. But, then again, maybe it shouldn’t.
I use the phrase “Rust Belt Orphan” in the title of this piece, because that is what the experience of coming of age at the time of the great economic unraveling feels like at the gut level. But it’s a dangerous and unproductive combination, when coupled with the whole Gen X thing.
In many ways, the Rust Belt is the Generation X of regions—the place that just doesn’t seem to fit in; the place that most people would just as soon forget about; the place that would, in fact, just as soon forget about itself; the place that, if it does dare to acknowledge its own existence or needs, barely notices the surprised frowns of displeasure and disdain from those on the outside, because they have already been subsumed by the place’s own self-doubt and self-loathing.
The whole Gen-X-misfit-wandering-in-the-Rust-Belt-wilderness meme is a palpably prevalent but seldom acknowledged part of our regional culture. It is probably just as well. It’s so easy for the whole smoldering heap of negativity to degenerate into a viscous morass of alienation and anomie. Little good can come from going any farther down that dead-end road.
WHITHER THE FUTURE?
The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
—“IGNORANCE,” MILAN KUNDERA
So where does this all leave us?
First, as a region, I think we have to get serious about making our peace with the past and moving on. We
