The Great Divide

I took sabbatical leave last fall, spending two months in my collaborator’s lab at the University of Michigan.  It was a great experience:  The group I was working with was enthusiastic, energetic and knowledgeable, and some of that energy rubbed off on me.  Ann Arbor is a nice town, and aside from the madness of football weekends, peaceful.   The neighborhood where my AirBnb was located had an interesting mix of people, most of whom were associated with the University in some manner, or with the tech companies that tend to spring up around the intellectual oases that research universities provide. 

But driving from Boston to Ann Arbor though my old home state of Pennsylvania, I felt out of place, as if I was traveling in an unfamiliar and unfriendly country.  Between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, I saw lots of Trump signs (sometimes with Trump and Jesus on the same placard), radiating a feeling of hostility and grievance that seem to say “you are not wanted here”.

I have been in most of the fifty states over the years (only missing Alaska, Mississippi and North Dakota now), and I have always felt at home wherever I traveled.  My best childhood memories come from the long camping trips my dad organized, taking us across the United States.  We saw Wall Drug in South Dakota, through the Badlands, camping in Yellowstone, over the Rockies and into Utah, where I ate my first taco.   My dad’s childhood friends from Cleveland, Lebanese Catholics, had moved to Provo and opened a Mexican restaurant in the middle of Mormon country.  We ate real Chinese food (as opposed to Cleveland chow mein) at a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown, visited Disneyland, and spent a night in the Arizona desert, where my brother and I climbed one of the volcanic peaks of the San Francisco group at dawn to watch the sun rise.

Those trips were educational, too.  They gave me a glimpse of things that a white kid from a red-lined Cleveland suburb would not normally see.   On one western voyage, we stopped in El Paso, Texas to visit Uncle Jack (Father Dalton to his parishioners), who at the time was pastor of a parish located on the border with Ciudad Juarez.  We traded swear words with the local kids, so I could call people rude names in Spanglish.  But I also got my first inklings about economic disparities, since it seemed that every Anglo that we met in El Paso, regardless of wealth, had Mexican servants.   On another trip, we drove through Washington, D.C., pulling a camping trailer behind our Chevy station wagon through a desperately poor Black neighborhood.  I still vividly recall the broken-windowed houses without doors, children sitting on the stoops, with the U.S. Capitol dome as a backdrop.

Still, through all of my travels across this country, I never felt like a foreigner, as I suddenly did in Pennsylvania, a place I thought I knew well.  What had changed?   I suspect the origins of the change can be traced to the increased mobility of American society since the 1970s, and the ability to go where we feel needed or wanted.  Certainly, migration has always been a part of the American culture:  Dirt farmers left the drought-stricken Midwest to find a new life in California during the Dust Bowl, much as the Mormons had earlier abandoned Illinois to find their Promised Land.  There were great northward migrations of Blacks looking for work and a better life, away from the old South.  Walking through the woods of eastern Massachusetts, one sees everywhere old stone walls and foundations of houses, where once farmers had tried to wrest crops from the stony and unforgiving New England soil, abandoned as more bountiful lands opened in the West.   But never before has it been so easy to pull up stakes and go.   No more months of planning and hesitancy, balancing the hopes of a better future against the comfort of the known (if imperfect) present.  When family and friends are only a phone call or video chat away, the fear of being cut off from familiar faces and places recedes.   A job offer or even a dating app-fueled romance can now be sufficient inducement for a cross-country move.

So who is moving, and to where?  Education is certainly a factor.  Armed with a college degree or technical school diploma, wherever they are born and raised, people will go to where the jobs are, and there is almost always a city at the end of that road.  More often than not, the city is on a coast, north (Chicago), south (Miami, Houston), east (Boston, New York), or west (LA, San Diego, Seattle).  I was born and raised in Cleveland, educated in Pennsylvania and Illinois, yet the last 33 years of my life have been spent in Boston.   The suburb where we live, Arlington, was once a bedroom community for tradespeople, civil servants, firefighters and police from Boston and Cambridge.  Now it plays host to a mix of races, ethnicities and sexual orientations made up of people not just from all over the U.S., but all over the world, drawn here by jobs at universities, biotech startups and software companies that dot the landscape.  It seems like every week, a new building goes up in nearby Lexington or Waltham, advertising office and laboratory space, and I don’t think they remain unoccupied for long.   

The inverse question is who remains behind in this modern migration.  People with family responsibilities, or a job that is tied to the place where they live, such as farming or a local business, would be on the list.  Those who stay are often needed where they are, and tend to be older, already established and less apt to feel wanderlust.   It is their children who are free to go, and apparently, go they do.   Pennsylvania straddles the Atlantic seaboard and the Midwest, and some demographics are informative:  Rural Sullivan County, northwest of Wilkes-Barre, home to World’s End State Park (yes, that’s is what it is called), has a median age of 48.7 years.  Probably not by coincidence, Sullivan also has the greatest percentage of people on disability in the state (20.1%).   In Philadelphia County, on the other hand, the average age is 33.7 years.  (Centre County, at 28.4 years, has the youngest population, but that’s where Penn State University is located, so I rest my case). 

But age alone cannot explain the fracture that has developed between rural and urban America.   A song published in 1919 asked “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm (after they’ve seen Paree)?”  As a person on the other side of the inequality, I can only speculate, but I suspect that much of the discontent is economic in nature.   With minimal employment opportunities and nothing obvious on the horizon, there is little incentive for young people to stick around, and what money that remains is spent on subsistence, not investment or infrastructure.

Again, Pennsylvania is instructive.  Coal and oil were essential to the economies of rural and small-town Pennsylvania:  Penn State, Pennzoil and other once-familiar brands started in Oil City, PA, north of Pittsburgh, with the first drilling of oil wells near the Allegheny River in 1861.   Oil booms and busts track with the history of the region:  I remember driving to work at my first job as a chemist (at a small factory sited on the tailings of an abandoned coal mine) in Canonsburg in the 1970s, seeing new oil wells being drilled along the side of the road in the wake of the Arab oil embargo.  (I even witnessed a “gusher”, that first blast of oil out of a new well before it is capped and harnessed).  My other job before graduate school was with a company that had contracts with the Department of Energy, turning coal into gasoline.  When the fracking boom began in the early 2000s, with western Pennsylvania sitting on top of the Marcellus oil shale, it was common to hear lawyers on local radio stations offering landowners mineral rights consults for dealing with the windfall.   Now environmental concerns and zero carbon emission goals threaten to bring this boom to an end, as well.  I remember visiting relatives in Scranton and Hazelton in the 1960s, with the benefits of anthracite (a local product) versus bituminous coal being an important topic of conversation.  On a recent drive along the northeast extension of the Pennsylvania Pike that passes through Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, we saw billboard advertisements for “Clean Coal”, but a vast series of wind turbines turning on the crests of hills following the turnpike tell a different story.  Trump’s denial of global warming or any need for change from a carbon-based energy economy earned him instant credit in multiple places:  Even with his obvious flaws, it is hard to get people to vote against their own livelihoods, especially when there is no clear alternative.  States with energy-based economies (Kentucky, Wyoming, West Virginia, the Dakotas, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma) all remained firmly in Trump’s camp.  Looking at this list, I am surprised myself with the number of states that depend on the extraction or processing of fossil fuels for their economic well-being.   Couple that with the absence of viable economic alternatives for themselves and their children, it is no wonder that a chasm has developed between these places and the economically vibrant coastal cities. 

Barack Obama made a famously impolitic statement about rural Pennsylvania during his first run for president: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.”   While a bit simplistic, there is a grain of truth to it, and he wasn’t going to get those votes anyway.  Obama was elected because the Black communities in the big cities actively supported him, and Hillary Clinton was defeated because they did not.   Joe Biden (like my own father, a product of Scranton, Pennsylvania) understood clearly that he needed the urban Black vote to win:  Those agonizing days watching Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin turn from pink to baby blue while city votes were counted proved him correct, as did the efforts by Trump loyalists to discount those same votes.

It is easy to dismiss support for Trump and fundamentalist beliefs as prejudice or stupidity.  But what is left when the kids are gone, the money dries up and there are no prospects for the future?  There is the church promising a better afterlife than what you currently have, and politicians who tell you it’s not your fault.  Opinions harden, and anyone that doesn’t fit in with the state of things is welcome to leave.  Economic isolation worsens, as companies that might have considered moving to a place with lower taxes and cheaper housing find the local culture too stultifying to attract the employees that they require.

However, we are now seeing a greater danger, as the disenchanted minority attempts to force what has become the norm in their lives on the rest of the country, regardless of anyone else’s views.  The overturn of Roe v. Wade is a harbinger of what lies ahead, and promises to increase the divide between urban and rural to the point where it becomes an uncrossable abyss.  I foresee a point at which some states conclude that, while the Supreme Court may hand down a decision, it is only the mutual consent of the states that makes them abide by those decisions.    Already Charlie Baker, the (Republican) governor of Massachusetts, has instructed state agencies to not aid other states in enforcing their laws on abortion refugees fleeing to the state.     Witness also the Sanctuary City movement, that arose in response to Trump’s attempts to use ICE as a weapon.  I can easily see states with strong gun laws deciding to go their own way in enforcing those laws regardless of any Supreme Court decision. 

One can be sure that those who will suffer the most from the overturn of Roe v. Wade are not the wives and daughters of the well-to-do or politicians, with places where abortions are legal within a few hours plane ride.  It is the poor and those tied to low-paying jobs for their livelihood that will bear the brunt of this.   Once the Supreme Court becomes viewed as a tool of one class of people, rather than an impartial referee, their rulings will become irrelevant, and we will have squandered a valuable asset of democracy:  The idea that justice applies to everybody.  The “majesty of the law” only works when it is perceived as such.