Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

by Chris Arnade

Jobs are not the only thing that Portsmouth has lost over the last few decades. Those jobs were the backbone of the community. People could walk straight from their graduation onto the factory floor and build a life around it. They would get a chunk of money every two weeks, get health care and pensions, which gave them the stability to get the home with the white picket fence and build a family. Without stable jobs to build a family around, Portsmouth began to fall apart. This happened in other back row towns, too. Whole communities started to fall apart, leaving a void in the center of town. It was the other losses, the ones that followed the job losses—the crumbling town centers, the broken families, the isolation, the pain, the desperation, the drugs, the humiliation and anger—that we in the front row didn’t fully see or understand. The devastating impact of the breakdown of community didn’t show up in our spreadsheets.