Political author doesn’t get Fayette County’s sense of community
As a Brownsville boy, born and bred, it is very challenging for me to respond to the new book Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, by Timothy P. Carney, who appeared on MSNBC this past week, without using a great deal of curse words.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Carney, a visiting fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, which, although officially non-partisan, closely allies itself with neoconservative viewpoints, would figure out a way to blame government support programs with the destruction of dual-parent upbringing and marriage, but it’s really too much when the premise of the text is that economic concerns would not destroy a community if they continue to have strong families and strong churches. He also asserts that we, here in Fayette County, agree that the American Dream is dead.
He’s correct about one thing: “You can’t look at Fayette County and say the problems aren’t cultural. You also cannot walk into Fayette County and tell the people to “choose” not to be left behind, to get better educated, to adapt, and to stop being so backward. Something deeper is broken.” What he’s wrong about is that when we, like so many other places reliant on manufacturing, coal, and steel, not only lost the wages that enabled us to feed our families, we needed a hand up, and we didn’t get one. To, in turn, imply that there is a causal, rather than a correlative connection between our disconnectedness proves faulty. When I can no longer be able to provide what I believe is expected of me, I am without hope. It is this hopelessness that erodes over decades.
Carney regularly faults Clinton’s loss in 2016 in Fayette County, to her flyover of these “unworthy” areas, but how is a drive-by any better than a flyover? He cites visits to two locations in Fayette County, Smitty’s Bar in Uniontown, and Vargas (newsstand) in Fayette City. Hardly an intense exploration of our County. What Carney should have learned when he read Hillbilly Elegy was that the thing we hate most, is other people telling us what’s wrong with us.
Here’s what you missed: we have strong community bonds here in our churches, our congregations, American Legions, VFW’s, our Masonic Lodges, Sons of Italys, Slovak clubs, our Eagles, our Lions, our Volunteer Fire Departments, and our labor unions. We believe that working together makes us stronger together. These are all of the places of community we have, and this is where we find ourselves a cash bash, gun bash or fish fry. You haven’t been to our Friday night football games, our high school musicals, our spring dance recitals, our bingo halls or festivals, our buckwheat pancake breakfasts, or our Lenten fish frys, so you don’t know, and you can’t know, that when we need it, we come together and we donate blood or eat spaghetti to save people from the expenses of their cancer diagnosis; we ARE a community; you were the outsider.
And the last reason I know that this guy doesn’t know anything about us that he didn’t even make it far enough into the county to have Kloc’s wings, Bud Murphy’s Pizza or a Penncraft Pepperoni roll.
What do I know? I know that each of us has the ability to be resilient and we have shown it. We are not defined by numbers, but by the actions we choose to take every day. My personal mission is to demonstrate that this author is crammed with stool, and the ideas in his book are not only wrong, but defaming, toward each and every one of us.
Kevin D. Jones is a resident of Fairchance and is seeking the Democratic nod in the primary election for Fayette County Commissioner.