Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

by Chris Arnade

In their minds, staying put is a mistake. If you stay, you limit your career, you limit your wealth, and you limit your intellectual growth. They also don’t fully understand the value of place because like religion, it is hard to measure. What is the value of staying near the family that raised you or in the valley where you were born? Had I asked those in my hometown when I visited why they stayed, why they were still there, I would have gotten the answer I heard from Cairo, to Amarillo, to rural Ohio. They would have looked at me like I was crazy, then said, “Because it is my home.” It is an answer that is obvious, because there is value in home, but it isn’t just the value of the house or the yard. It is the connections, networks, friends, family, congregation, the Little League team, the usuals at the hairdresser, regulars at the bar, the union hall, the crew at the vape store, the regulars at the half-price movie night, the guys for Tuesday night basketball. The front row doesn’t fully get that because they don’t see that value, and like me, they moved before and they will probably move again. We have broken our connections and built new ones. If we can do it, so can anyone else, we think. When communities and towns are destroyed, partly because of the front row’s policies of globalization, the front row solution is, “Well, just move.” Buffalo is dying, so just leave Buffalo. Or Appalachia or the Rust Belt or Texas or Ohio or wherever they see suffering. It doesn’t ma...