Gary, Indiana was a steel town. Pittsburgh was another steel town. Detroit was an automotive town. All of them, and more, were part of the industrial economy that began in England, and here, and in Germany, that powered the shift from agriculture to industry.
Then the steel mills moved to Korea, and China, and India, and almost everywhere where large numbers of unemployed agricultural workers had moved to cities looking for work, because the industrial revolution had made it possible for agriculture to substitute machines for human and animal labor. The industrial revolution thrived on cheap, former agricultural, labor.
When our steel mills and automotive factories shrank, and many of them closed, it was not our cheap agricultural laborers who were out of work: it was our rather expensive industrial workers. Industry had provided, gradually, reluctantly, better wages, and government had insisted on better working conditions, and unions had fought for health insurance, and pensions, but when the industrial revolution came to Korea and China and India and Brazil, industry moved there, for cheap labor, and lower wages, and almost no health insurance, and no pensions.
The politicians in this country who talk about restoring our industrial base have no understanding of history. We cannot go back to the time when cities were forming, from the surplus of formerly agricultural labor. We have already done that! We are what happens when heavy industry looks around and moves to places like that, again, because that kind of industry wants cheap labor and a place where they can paint the sky orange, and pay hungry people to work twelve hour days.
Gary, Indiana, once owned by Bethlehem Steel and its cousins, should hope that its skies never turn orange, again. Lake Michigan was poisoned by the waste from steel mills. Lake Michigan should hope that Gary, Indiana never becomes a primitive industrial city, again.
The problem is that those were jobs, and they are not there, anymore. The city, once a captive to the steel mills, now abandoned by them, and the people who used to work in the steel mills, had to figure our what to do next. So do all of us.
Politicians don't know what to do: they pretend they are going to rebuild Detroit as it was.
Voters don't know what to do: they have not figured out that we are in an economic evolution, after agriculture, after heavy industry, to whatever comes next. They are worried about house payments, listen to demagogues, and sloganeers.
Fifty year-old unemployed workers don't know what to do: they worked hard, but their skills are no longer needed. What is needed is the skill of a newer kind of labor, able to read plans, program a computer, and add value to plain manufacturing.
Tea Party People don't know what to do: they think that government regulation and taxation is the problem. They almost say they want orange skies, again. They want . . . Hell! They don't know what they want! They are ranting, without understanding.
The Republican Party pretends that the problem is big government: big government did not move the steel mills to Korea and Brazil. Cheap labor did. Bethlehem Steel did. The lack of decent wages and health care and pensions did.
The Democrats don't understand: they pretend that if they tweak the old system, it will be OK. It won't be OK. They don't have the courage to say that if you want universal health care, you need to change the silly system that allows insurance companies to skim off 20 or 25%.
Our educational system flounders. We have, virtually, given up on our public educational system because we have no vision of what kind of education we need to provide, not only for our kids, but for millions of former industrial workers, to make them productive, again, doing something else.
How can we deal with our national problems by listening to people who have no idea of what is going on? Unions aren't the problem! Health care is not the problem! Social Security is not the problem! Medicare is not the problem! The problem is that we are in the middle of an economic and societal revolution, after agriculture, and after early, heavy industry. We have to gear up for what comes next. When we do that, those other things will fall into place, in a new economy.
I almost hate to vote. I keep looking for a grown-up, who does not pretend that orange skies were lovely, and that working in a steel mill was lovely, too. It was a time, and it is time to move on.
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