But strength isn't enough, and it hasn't been for a long time. You have to be smart, too, and ambitious - I was, when I moved to Baltimore right out of high school, with the idea of turning my lifelong interest in programming into the sort of career that Mississippi didn't, and so far as I know still doesn't, have the industry to support. Lot of people where I'm from had ambition, often beyond anything the local environment would support. Lot of them had the same smarts I did, too, and in many cases better - behind all the pretty talk, I'm really not all that bright.
But smarts and ambition aren't enough, either, and haven't been for a long time. You have to be lucky - I was, when I discovered at age six the avocation for programming that's since developed first into a marketable trade and then into a solid career. Not that I knew that was what I was doing, of course. I just knew I really loved writing code, and I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to find that out and luckier still to have a family able to support it with an Apple II. Absent that luck, I'd have gone nowhere, because I'd have had nowhere to go. Maybe to college instead, and had a small chance of learning a marketable trade and a guarantee of decades' worth of debt. Maybe just nowhere. And that's not all the luck I've had - not by a hell of a long shot. That was just some of the earliest.
That's the thing about a life like the one I've built, the life you're saying that everyone where I'm from should build, as though it were as simple as choosing to do so - none too fancy a life, to be sure, but I'm in no debt, and my career is stable and remunerative enough that I can afford to send considerable money home to those among my family who haven't had my good fortune - that life is the result of good fortune, to an utterly implausible extent. Had any of an enormous number of events turned out even slightly differently than it did, I would not now be in a position to tell you what an ignorant, prejudiced jackass you must be to have said something like what you just did. At ten on a Sunday morning? I'd probably be Ubering people from brunch to shopping, or something, in a car I'd have gone into debt to buy, always counting in the back of my mind how many dollars I need to make today in order to break somewhere close to even, and it'd be a miracle if I managed in even one month to send home what I send home every month now. My laid-off mother wouldn't be getting the right care for her Graves' disease, because who could cover the co-pay? And my cousin, paralyzed last year in the sort of "industrial accident" that happens when you're so hopeless broke that cooking meth looks like an option? Well, he'd still have the communicating pressure ulcers over ~15% of his body that he got from his first, incompetent, care team. So odds are I'd have a couple of funerals to worry about pretty soon, too, and that's far from cheap, quite aside from the fact that rednecks feel the loss of loved ones every bit as much as real people do.
So, okay. You want to talk about rural people overcoming hardship to make lives of worth in the modern world? Hi there. I've done it. Having done it, I've had a great deal of opportunity to observe the degree to which doing so requires overcoming vastly opposing odds. Lest I be mistaken as arrogant, let me note this is not a boast. This luck is no cause for pride, any more than would be to have bought a winning lottery ticket. That I happened to be well placed to exploit the lucky breaks I got pales to insignificance alongside the vast, vast number of lucky breaks I've had - and much more so alongside the fact that, had matters gone only slightly differently from how they in fact have, all the smarts and ambition in the world wouldn't mean a damn thing.
And here you are, arguing whether you know it or not that that kind of astonishing luck scales. Not only that, but slandering the people left behind by the fact that that kind of astonishing luck doesn't scale, left behind with no option but to make the best life they can under the circumstances or give up, and whose circumstances have grown latterly so hopeless that many of them are giving up - and that's the thing you overlook here, the crucial point on which your ignorance or carelessness renders all the rest of your analysis worse than useless. When those of my ancestors who immigrated did so, they did it because America was a nation capable of offering them hope - hope of a better future, for themselves and their descendants, than their home countries could any longer sustain. Even those others of my ancestors who were transported under criminal sentence, who lived years or decades or the rest of their lives under effective indenture, with their liberties sharply circumscribed - even to them, America was a beacon of hope for the future. But that was many years ago, and since then, America has changed. Where my ancestors and the ancestors of my cohort found hope, that hope has gone, to be replaced by hardship that seems everlasting and in far, far too many cases is. Somehow, in spite of that, many of us survive - not all, to be sure, and fewer every year, and in circumstances which I misdoubt would horrify a lifelong city man. Shall I tell you about the shack where lived some of my happiest childhood memories, and the way black mold gets into chipboard walls? But that's not where I live any more. I had the good fortune to go on to better things. Many among my cohort did not - people whom I loved and ran with and hated and fought with all through my childhood and adolescence, people who knew me and whom I knew in the way of children who hold nothing back, in the way that later life never can quite offer, men and women who taught me how to live and understand my place in the world, how to be a worthwhile human being, who initiated me into all manner of mysteries both wonderful and terrible, and made it possible for me to attain whatever value I can ever hope to manage.
Those people, you're calling weak.
And then you wonder how a Trump happens.
Well, worse is coming, if things go on as they have. Worse first for you and then for us all. I don't want that. No sane man with any grasp of history could possibly want that. But the lie of progress, of the universe having an arc that bends inexorably somewhere, is too seductive, and the closest thing it offers to consolation is that I might get to see some people like you dragged screaming into hell before my own turn comes. I don't want that. I'd much rather none of us gets dragged into hell at all. I voted for Trump in large part to try to stave that off - in the hope that such a shocking setback might give rise to a general reevaluation of perspective on the left, to something which might lead to the realization that you cannot, you may not, simply wash your hands of whole peoples in their millions and expect to carry on as you please, never needing fear any consequence. But that hasn't happened and I don't think it will. Instead of reevaluation we see exhortations of greater energy for the cause, and instead of any gesture toward rapprochement we see intensification of the same exclusionary rhetoric and behavior that's brought us to the pretty pass we stand in now.
And I don't expect you to change your mind because of what I've said here, either. It would astonish me if you did, not least because I've been much more honest than kind, which is too common a failing on my part in any case; effective rhetoric in this circumstance requires perhaps above all that the fissures of a fragile ego not be struck. But here I've barely tried to be otherwise, because I have in large part given up - be what I may, I'm hardly insusceptible to an absence of hope in my own right, and I've long since ceased to see much cause for that in my efforts to warn people away from the abyss into which they seem hell-bent on dragging us all. But if I've achieved nothing else, as I so strongly suspect to be the case, then I may at least find whatever consolation there is to be found in the fact that, when your turn comes as a turn will come for all of us, you'll have no excuse for failing to understand what is happening, and no ability truly to say that you were never told. Meaningless as it is, if that's the best I've got, then I'll take it. And who knows? Perhaps you will surprise me after all.