What Should We Be Talking About?

Learning from history, ethics, stagnation, who we are as a people. . .

Photo by Martha Ture

I used to go to a redneck bar in Contra Costa County, California. It was 1989 and I was working as a reporter for a small local newspaper. Ronald Reagan was president, and the economy was rapidly deteriorating for everybody with whom I came in contact. Wages were stagnant for some, declining for others, and the public were in a bad mood, frightened, anxious, and baffled.

What happened? people asked. The public, in national economic doldrums (stagflation), had voted for Ronald Reagan, who had run successfully on stirring up resentments toward people on welfare, and on his motto “Let’s Make America Great Again.”

"For those without job opportunities, we'll stimulate new opportunities, particularly in the inner cities where they live. For those who've abandoned hope, we'll restore hope and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again."

That was candidate Ronald Reagan at the 1980 Republican National Convention. Supply side/trickle down economics was supposed to make everybody richer. Instead, I was writing two hard news stories a day, telling the readers that things just got worse and there was not one thing they could do about it.

There wasn’t enough money for the County hospital to make the repairs necessary to make the building safe and sanitary. Pass-through money from the state had dried up, because the pass-through money from the federal government to the states had dried up, because that was Ronald Reagan’s policy, and the Treasury Department’s execution of the policy.

A Treasury undersecretary addressed the Conference of Mayors at their convention, and when they asked “since you canceled federal Community Development Block Grants, where’s our money?” Mr. Undersecretary said “It’s in the pockets of your taxpayers. Go get it.”

“But Sir, some of us are mayors of poor communities, like Richmond, Virginia and Richmond, California. What about us?”

And Mr. Undersecretary said “That’s too bad. People can choose where they want to live. They can vote with their feet.”

That campaign promise to the inner cities? You just read the stunningly unaware policy prescription for new opportunities for jobless inner city residents. Move away to somewhere with more “opportunities.”

That heartbreaking sadism from the mouth of the Reaganaut was only tip of the sword/iceberg/needle. Every day, I wrote those two bad news stories. A local chemical company’s hazardous waste ponds were leaking into San Pablo Bay, and the EPA was not working very hard to get the company into compliance. The federal Bureau of Reclamation was selling contracts for water it had no right to sell to farmers in the Central Valley. A national solid waste company with a rap sheet as long as your arm had one of its vice presidents on the state Solid Waste Management Board. Regulations against Conflict of Interest had not been raised.

On Tuesday nights between 5 p.m. when the newspaper office closed and 7 p.m. when city council meetings convened, I was at liberty, and because it was convenient, I spent an hour at a redneck bar near Concord.

I put my money on the bar like everyone else, and I made no secret of the fact that I was a reporter. The clientele were a mixed bag. One of the men was blatantly racist, but another man told him “Travis, if I was as ignorant as you, I wouldn’t let everybody know it. Your own grandmother is an Indian.”

I learned a lot in that bar. A man who worked for a Carpenters Workers Union local told me that the union had somehow got itself in the position of inviting a Soviet labor union leader to address an upcoming national Carpenters’ Union conference; getting out of the deal was proving squirmy. A couple of men worked for a national scabbing company -an outfit that hired workers to go around the country working as scabs when unions were on strike. They were from Alabama, working at the POSCO steel plant, and unprepared for the working conditions. A woman who worked for Pacific Bell told me that the workers were going to vote to strike. Sure enough, 41,000 Pac Bell workers went on strike after talks with the Communications Workers of America broke down.

On October 17, 1989, at 5:03 p.m., the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. It was the strongest earthquake to hit the Bay Area since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It measured 7.1 on the Richter scale and caused 63 deaths, nearly 3,800 injuries, and an estimated $6 billion in property damage.

I later learned that the regular patrons of that redneck bar volunteered their skills and services to earthquake victims. Some of them were helping out in San Francisco’s Marina District, where 35 buildings were completely destroyed as the ground liquified, more than 60 people died, and thousands were injured.

That was 1989, thirty-five years ago. The other day, an acquaintance in South Carolina reported what happened when his work truck broke down. He walked to the next construction site and asked for help. The crew boss said “We don’t do that.”

So what happened? We ask again. So many analyses tell us that we are victims of having our resentments manipulated, that our psychology makes suckers of us, that we don’t use critical thinking, that we watch Fox TV and believe the lies, that we aren’t smart enough to figure it out, that we believe Trump can improve our finances.

Remember when you voted for Ronald Reagan?