The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

by Sarah Kendzior

If you are thirty-five or younger—and quite often, older—the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay raise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.

America is becoming a nation of zero-opportunity employers, in which certain occupations are locked into a terrible pay rate for no valid reason, and certain groups—minorities, the poor, and increasingly, the middle class—are locked out of professions because they cannot buy their way in.

“I didn’t risk my life in Afghanistan so I could come back and watch people go hungry in America,” writes Jason Kirell, a thirty-five-year-old veteran who is on food stamps. “I certainly didn’t risk it so I could come back and go hungry.” He notes that it is common for military wives to subsist on food stamps while their husbands work overseas and for veterans to end up on food stamps upon their return.

When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.

The Senate’s definition of “journalist” applies that same standard to unaffiliated writers and reporters: Do not listen to them, because they do not matter. Do not protect them, because what they offer is not worth protecting—although it may be worth prosecuting.

It is difficult to confront a complex history. It is painful to acknowledge systematic injustice. It is uncomfortable to hear firsthand accounts that contradict the dominant narrative, or that undermine what many would like to believe. But it is easy to blame the Internet.

But the deeper fear, the real sadness, is that ordinary people are insignificant to the government, and that those in power are indifferent to our fate.