Opinion
The Radicalization of a Small American Town
The change has occurred so slowly that at times I
hardly noticed it.
By Brian
Groh
Mr. Groh is
a novelist.
Oct. 23,
2020
LAWRENCEBURG,
Ind. — For 20 years, off and on, I’ve lived in this small, blue-collar town
about 30 minutes west of Cincinnati. My grandparents, immigrants from Germany,
bought my old farmhouse, on 15 acres, during World War II. I’ve always felt
that this town embodies much of what I love about the Midwest: friendliness, a
lack of pretension and a prevailing sense of decency among neighbors.
A few weeks
ago, I met up with a good friend, an 84-year-old retiree named Frank, who lives
nearby. He told me that he’d put up a “Biden-Harris” lawn sign, and within 36
hours it had been stolen. In response, his girlfriend taped another sign to the
inside of their ranch home’s front window. Frank immediately took it down. “The
chair I like to sit in is right there,” he explained. “The next time they come,
I’m afraid it might be a brick, or a bullet.” Just a few years ago, I would
have said that Frank was overreacting. Now I’m not so sure.
Over the
past four years, my hometown has become radicalized. This is a loaded word, but
it’s the only way to describe it.
As recently
as 2008, I saw Bill Clinton speak at our community center, where the crowd was
so large that people had to listen to him from loudspeakers in a nearby
firehouse. The mood was electric. “People are broke at the end of every month,”
he said. “This has to change.” He promised that with Democratic leadership, it
would. An aggressive new energy policy would bring jobs, with higher incomes.
And this
promise was very welcome. At the time, the best job I could find was at a call
center, selling home security systems. But I felt hopeful. I stuck an Obama
sign in my yard and a campaign bumper sticker on my old Corolla. Like a lot of
my neighbors, I believed that Democrats would, in fact, improve the town’s
fortunes, and on election night, Barack Obama carried the state.
But things
didn’t improve. Not really. The latest census reports median household income
in Lawrenceburg as $30,735, with a little over 32 percent of us in poverty. And
in 2014, according to The New York Times, our small county (which is over 97
percent white) sent more people to prison than San Francisco. In January, our
hospital cited a “higher number of uninsured patients” as a reason it needed to
“right-size” its work force by laying off 31 employees and eliminating
behavioral health services.
And there
are darker omens. Last fall, my teenage nephew came running into the house,
wide-eyed, saying he’d found a human skull in the woods. I followed him until,
panting at the bottom of a ravine, I saw the skull trapped in a thicket of
sticks and leaves, missing several of its front teeth. The police arrived, and
for the rest of the night, I watched from my bedroom window as flashlights
swept over the long grass, through the woods, until they were finally swallowed
by darkness.
It was an
overdose, an officer told me later, the victim most likely another casualty of
the nation’s opioid epidemic. (In 2017, in this county, there were 80 opioid
prescriptions for every 100 residents.) The young man seemed to have died
higher up on the hill, where they found more of his remains. The rain must have
washed his skull down the slope.
The skull
felt like a portent, but also a turning point. Months later, I noticed a vendor
at a roadside stand selling Trump flags. “Trump 2020: Keep America Great,” one
read. Another read “Trump 2020: No More [Expletive].” It was more than half a
year away from the election, and I remember thinking: Why flags? A flag was
something people fought under, and for; something people carried to war. By the
summer, another vendor popped up selling flags with even bolder slogans like
“Trump 2020: [Expletive] Your Feelings,” “Liberty or Die,” “Make Liberals Cry
Again.” The economy was in the dumps but the flag business was booming.
And not
just Trump flags. In the past few months, I have seen three Confederate flags
hoisted in neighbors’ yards, where previously I’d seen none. Just a few weeks
ago, two masked men appeared outside our high school, holding a large KKK flag
and fliers, apparently scouting for young recruits.
At times,
all of this has felt like a horror movie, where it starts off happily enough —
in a sun-drenched, idyllic farmhouse — and then the darkness slowly takes over.
The change has occurred so slowly that at times, I hardly noticed it, until one
day I barely recognized my hometown.
Last week,
I drove down for a closer look at the nearest Trump stand, where alongside the
flags hung Trump T-shirts. One read, “I’m a Deplorable.” And it reminded me of
my grandparents, of how they felt while still in Germany: willing to work as
hard as anyone but seeing no way to improve their circumstances. In my more
charitable moments, I can see my neighbors’ xenophobia and racism and their
Trump-loving thuggishness as symptoms of alienation from people who feel
forsaken and disdained. This is, perhaps, the part of me that still feels
deeply connected to where I live. But I’ve been appalled by the ugliness I’ve
seen here this past year. And more often, in the dwindling autumn light, I find
myself staring at my grandparents’ old farmhouse and wondering if it’s finally
time to pack my bags.
Brian Groh
(@BrianHGroh) is the author of the novel “Summer People.”
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